


Arrest My Soul

by ThoughtfulConstellations



Category: Batgirl (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Animated), DCU (Comics), DCU (Movies), Grayson (Comics), Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Barebacking, Blow Jobs, Cunnilingus, Discovering Dick's Alive, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Flashbacks, New 52, Post-Batgirl Annual 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-13
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-04-14 14:07:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 44,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4567401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThoughtfulConstellations/pseuds/ThoughtfulConstellations
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dick Grayson lifts his head when he senses her.  His blue eyes land on her, and he freezes, much like Barbara did when she saw him.  For the longest time, they simply hold still and stare at each other.  Neither of them moves, and neither of them breathes.  Time ticks by, and all they do is stare and hold their breath.  Then Dick stands and says the worst possible three words in the world: “I can explain.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part I: Resurrection

**Author's Note:**

> It seems I've fallen into a long spiral of Dick x Barbara shipping, so here's my first Dick x Barbara fic!
> 
> I know that opinions are pretty split on Batgirl of Burnside and Barbara's characterization in it, so I tried to stay true to the current team's characterization of Barbara as they tackle Batgirl while also keeping her grounded and Gail Simone-y. So hopefully I managed to do that somewhat successfully here because I wanted to give nods to both interpretations.
> 
> This fic takes place a few weeks after Batgirl Annual #3, and yes, it's one of those Barbara-finds-out-Dick-isn't-dead fics =)
> 
> Feedback is appreciated! You can also find me on Tumblr as babsjoangordon!
> 
> Recommended listening for this chapter:  
> "Ghost (Acoustic)" - Halsey  
> "Hello My Old Heart" - The Oh Hellos
> 
> Enjoy! =)

It starts with a text message. An address from an untraceable number that quite frankly pisses Barbara off solely because she can’t trace it. She can _always_ trace any phone that contacts her, and yet she can’t trace this one. So Barbara goes flying out of her apartment as fast as she can, annoyed, fully dressed as Batgirl, and prepared to deal with whatever is going to happen.  She’s dealt with similar situations like this before—a mysterious text, an uncomfortable phone call with someone disguising their voice on the other end…she’s used to it.  She’s _Batgirl_.  But just because she’s used to it doesn’t mean she’s going to get too comfortable, too lazy.  She knows that if she lets herself get cocky, if she lets herself act like this is “just another day at the grind,” something will happen to put her in her place, and she doesn’t want to risk that.  Not after she’s fought for everything.  Not after Frankie’s gotten involved.

It occurs to her that maybe she should let Frankie know, but she’s too pissed off and too curious to stop for the quick second it would take to either shoot her roommate a text or give her a call.  While this text could lead to anything, it could very well lead to something small and anti-climactic, and Barbara doesn’t want to get Frankie involved with something that’ll wind up being a waste of time.

So she swings through the air and makes her way to the location that was texted to her, and she wondes why the hell she got this text, who the hell sent it, and what the hell she’s going to find once she arrives. Her whole body is lit up, ready for a fight.  The sender of the text message could be anyone—a good guy, a bad guy, or even a neutral, but she can’t take any chances, so she stays prepared.  She keeps her body loose and limber, and she tells herself to expect the worst.

* * *

 

When Barbara arrives at the location, she sees a building. The building isn’t tall, nor is it abandoned, but it certainly doesn’t appear to be in frequent use anymore. Quickly, her green eyes scan over the façade, and she takes note of where any signs of weaknesses in structural integrity might be.  She’s noticed at least two places when gunshots suddenly snap loud, sharp, and fast through the air.

That’s all it takes to alert Barbara into action, and she breaks out into a run. She can already feel her adrenaline rising, and she stays on alert.  Her eyes dart all around her, and she feels her senses light up so she can pick up on the smallest details.  If someone’s hiding in any shadows, she wants to be ready for them.  Careful not to draw attention to her approach, she runs into the building and starts towards the gunshots. If she’s going to attack, she needs to keep some semblance of stealth as she runs along. She needs to keep the element of surprise in her favor for as long as she can.

Barbara gets closer to the sound of the source, and she hears grunting. She sends a silent, telepathic apology to Frankie for not clueing her in before as she rounds the corner, and she prepares herself for whatever lies around the edge. Breathing in and then breathing out, she steadies herself and focuses her mind.  She’ll be ready—she has to be.

But what she finds on the other side of the corner isn’t something she thought she was going to find at all.  She freezes as she sees a man on the floor, blood pouring from his head, his eyes closing as he loses consciousness, and a man kneeling down beside him. The kneeling man isn’t facing her—he’s picking something up and putting it in his pocket—but she doesn’t need to see his face to know who he is.  She tells herself that this isn’t real—she isn’t seeing what she thinks she’s seeing.  But the more she looks, the longer she stands frozen and watches the kneeling man begin to bind the other man’s hands, the more she understands that it’s real.

Dick Grayson lifts his head when he senses her.  His blue eyes land on her, and he freezes, much like Barbara did when she saw him.  For the longest time, they simply hold still and stare at each other.  Neither of them moves, and neither of them breathes. Time ticks by, and all they do is stare and hold their breath.  Then Dick stands and says the worst possible three words in the world: “I can explain.”

Barbara blinks.  She stands completely still, and she blinks in shock as she looks at him.  On the floor, the man Dick knocked out remains unconscious, but she barely even pays any attention to him.  She just looks at Dick, silently wondering how this came to be. He’s supposed to be dead. He died.  Dick died, and he shouldn’t be here. She wants to say these things to him. She wants to tell him all of these thoughts racing through her mind, thoughts telling her that what she’s currently seeing in front of her isn’t happening, but she can’t find the words. For once in her life, she doesn’t have the words for anything.

“I can explain,” Dick repeats.  He’s looking at her with those blue eyes of his, eyes that have always made her lose her breath a little bit whenever she looked directly into them. He’s looking at her, and she wants to scream, but all she can do is gape.

“No,” she whispers.  Her mouth is dry, and she can’t even swallow, but she manages to get out a whisper. “No.”

“I can…I can explain.” The longer Dick looks at her, the more he seems to have lost the ability to say more than those three words. They both want to speak, but neither one can find the words.  Neither one can move.  Finally, he presses his hand to his ear. “Matron, this is Agent 37.  I secured the target, but I have to take care of something for a while. I’m going dark, and I’ll rendezvous with you at our next stop.”

Barbara barely hears any of it.  She blinks a few more times, and then she takes a stiff step towards him, one hand going for where she keeps her batarangs.  The shock slowly starts to melt away, and she grows more suspicious as she looks at Dick, at who _looks like_ Dick. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

“I can explain,” he says for a fourth time.  His face falls a little bit, and he looks ashamed, anguished, and disappointed.  Barbara can’t figure out why all three of these emotions flicker across his face, but she wants to know.  “I can explain” is used to defend something that’s almost always un-defendable.  “I can explain” is used to justify something really, really shitty. And seeing Dick here when he’s supposed to be dead is either really, really amazing or really, really shitty, and Barbara can’t decide which.

“How are…you’re…we _all_ thought…” She stops speaking and frowns at him.

He looks away for a brief second, shame filling his eyes, but when he looks back at her, he looks a little fearful. “I know…I know.”

And then Barbara moves towards him.  She doesn’t know if she’s going to hit him or hug him, but when she reaches him, she flings her arms around him and buries her face in his neck. Tears burn hot and bright behind her closed eyelids, but she won’t let them fall.  She doesn’t want to cry just yet, and she especially doesn’t want to cry in front of Dick.  For a second, he falters, but then he hugs her back, too. His arms are warm and strong, his muscles thick and toned.  He looks like Dick, feels like Dick, and God, he even smells like Dick, but Barbara won’t let her guard down just yet.

“You’re dead,” she says.  Her voice doesn’t sound like it belongs to her, and she pulls back from him only when she’s sure she isn’t going to cry.  Dick looks down at her, and helplessness is written all over his face. She feels the urge to sniff, but she’ll be damned if she sniffs in front of him.  Slowly, old habits start to come back, and she finds herself falling into habits she’s forgotten she ever had around him.

“I’ll explain everything,” he says, sounding like he’s pleading with her. “I mean it.  But we need to get out of here.”

She frowns. “Why? What are you doing here?” Off to her left, she notices the man still knocked out, and she glances towards him before looking back at Dick. “Does he have anything to do with this?”

“Kind of,” Dick says hesitantly. “But kind of not.  We just…we need to leave.  I’ll explain everything as soon as we’re out of here.”

“We’ll go to my apartment,” she says.

“But they’ll find—“

“I moved,” she interrupts. “I’m not living where you last remember me.”

This time, Dick frowns. “You…moved?”

“Yeah. To Burnside.”

“ _Burnside_?”

She shoots him a look, and for a quick moment, it’s almost like Dick was never gone.  For the briefest second, it’s like they’ve always been with each other, and only moments ago they were laughing and giving each other shit.  But when she looks away, she swallows and nods. “Yeah.  I’ve been…you know what.  I’ll tell you when we leave.”

“Let’s go.”

Barbara nods towards the unconscious man. “What about him?”

“My people will take care of it.”

She lifts her eyebrows. “Your _people_?”

“I…I’ll explain.”

“Then I guess I’d better lead the way.”

* * *

 

Barbara has to keep herself from looking back at him the whole time she swings and soars through the air back to her apartment.  She keeps telling herself that he’s there with her, that he hasn’t fallen off the face of the Earth, but she still looks over her shoulder for tiny half-seconds just to double check.  She can’t be too sure, nor does she want to be.

Finally, they duck into the tiny apartment through the entrance Barbara’s created through one of the back windows.  Barbara’s the first one inside, and she thinks she’ll be able to get away with sneaking out without Frankie when she accidentally knocks a mug off her nightstand.  The mug goes crashing to the ground and shatters, the sound too loud for the quiet apartment. Immediately, sounds from out in the living room grab Barbara’s attention, and she hears familiar footsteps marching back towards her room.  In a quick bound, she snatches her cowl off, leaps over her bed, and reaches the door right as the knob starts to turn.

“Hey,” she says, poking her head out.  Keeping her body mostly behind the door so Frankie can’t see her, she leans her temple against the doorframe while trying not to look too out of breath. “What’s up?”

“Where’ve you been?” Frankie asks. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“Oh. I just went out to get some air. I’ve been having some problems with the algorithm, so I thought it’d be beneficial to clear my head for a little while with a nice walk,” Barbara replies with a nonchalant shrug. Frankie narrows her eyes, and she glances down towards where the door is hiding Barbara’s body.

“Were you doing Batgirl things?” she asks.

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me.  Come on—I thought we were past the whole lying thing now that I know who you are. I can _see you_ hiding yourself.  Where the hell have you been?” Frankie’s clearly suspicious, and she’s not going to let up. “I thought we were a team.”

“We are!” Barbara protests.  She hears Dick creeping around behind her, his footsteps so quiet that if she weren’t who she is she’d miss them. “I just had a quick thing to go solve. No big.  It’s totally cool.”

Frankie crosses her arms and narrows her eyes, though now she looks a little concerned. “Are you hurt?”

“No, Frankie, I’m fine.  Totally ok. One hundred percent.”

“I’m coming in.”

Before Barbara can react, Frankie pushes past Barbara and walks into the room, her eyes going straight away to Dick.  Mostly flustered and a little bit furious, Barbara shuts the door behind Frankie and stands back while Dick awkwardly shuffles about. Barbara’s never seen Dick act awkward. She’s seen him shy, even a little uncomfortable, but right now, he’s straight up awkward. He doesn’t know what’s going on, who Frankie is, or how Frankie knows Barbara’s secret, and it’s written plainly across his face as if he’s got it tattooed there.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Barbara says gravely. “He’s an old friend. We just…haven’t seen each other.”

Frankie recognizes Dick, but she doesn’t say anything about it. She just lifts her eyebrows and glances back and forth between Barbara and Dick. “I’m good at keeping secrets.”

“Good.” Barbara nods. “I knew that…but good.”

An awkward silence rips throughout the room, and the three people stand in it for a few moments before Frankie clears her throat.  “I’ll…I guess I’ll wait for this story then. I’ll…see you later, Babes.”

Barbara nods gratefully, but she catches Frankie’s lidded glance her way as she starts for the door. “Yeah.  I’ll see you.”

“And I won’t say a word.”

“Thank you.”

Barbara holds her breath until Frankie’s gone.  When the door shuts behind her roommate, Barbara slowly exhales, and she crosses towards the bed, sinking down onto it. “Sorry. She doesn’t really take no for an answer. And she’s been so great about everything….that’s my roommate, by the way.  The new one.”

“The new one,” Dick repeats, somewhat dazed. “I guess two more people now know I’m not dead.”

His statement brings Barbara back to Earth, back to the situation at hand, and she looks up at him.  He doesn’t look quite so awkward anymore, but he doesn’t look completely comfortable, either. She wonders how she appears to him. More out of habit than genuine concern, she does her own full body check on herself.  Her shoulders are too tight, her lips somewhat pursed, her fists are balled up, and her knee is bouncing like crazy.  She looks like the bundle of nerves she’s been trying to quell since she first laid eyes on the back of Dick’s head, and she hates herself a little bit for it.

Now that they’re alone— _really_ alone—she lets her eyes scan over all of him.  He looks a little more built, if that’s even possible, and he’s got a few more scars.  Normal people wouldn’t be able to tell, but Barbara’s never been normal.  With her eidetic memory, she knows how every inch of his skin looked the last time she saw it.  Quickly, she corrects her thoughts—she didn’t know what _every_ inch of his skin looked like, but she knows he has a few new scars, and that’s the point.

His hair’s a little more kept than it ever was.  The back and the sides are a little shorter, but his bangs flop just a bit to keep him looking the tiniest bit boyish.  He doesn’t look like a kid anymore, though he hasn’t looked like one since he hit puberty during his teen years.  But now as she looks at him, she sees a man. She sees a man, and she knows she missed watching him become who he is today because as far as she was concerned, Dick was dead.

But as she continues looking at him, she sees things that are the same. His eyes, that mouth, those hands…so much of him is the same, and she can’t deny it.  This is Dick Grayson standing in front of her, and she never thought she’d see him again.  Her eyes start to fill up with tears again, and she quickly looks away so he doesn’t see. Swallowing once, she takes a breath. “How?”

Using her peripheral, she sees him hang his head just a little. The gesture isn’t much, but it’s there. “Cardioplegiac,” he says. “I didn’t really die.  I mean…I did…but I wasn’t permanently dead.  I was brought back to life.  But Bruce asked me to go into Spyral to protect our identities.  Spyral…Spyral’s been hunting for masks.  Trying to find our identities.  So I had to stay dead, and I had to go in.”

Barbara feels like she’s gone numb.  It’s like being paralyzed all over again, but this time it’s not just in her legs. It’s in her entire body. Panic strikes her heart, and she genuinely believes for only a couple quick moments that she’s lost all control of herself, but when she makes her knee start bouncing again, she feels her panic subside. “That was you,” she says, her words a little flat. “Several weeks ago.”

She doesn’t need to specify where she was or what she’d been doing. Dick knows.  He knows, and he nods to show that he knows what she means, to show that she’s right.

“Yeah,” he says. “I had special tech to hide my face…you aren’t supposed to know I’m alive.”

“And Bruce did this?” she asks.

“Bruce _asked_ this,” he corrects. “I agreed.”

“And you left?” Her volume goes a little higher, and she sees the slight worry in his eyes, but she doesn’t stop. “You left and let us all think you were dead?  Dick, I went to your _funeral_.  You _died_ , and I went to your _funeral_.”

“I know,” he says quickly, too quickly. “I know.  And please believe me when I say I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to do that to you, but…but this was the right thing to do.  It _is_ the right thing. I have to protect you, Babs—“

“No,” she snaps suddenly. “You don’t get Babs privileges. It’s Barbara to you.”

The expression on Dick’s face makes her feel like she slapped a little boy who doesn’t understand why.  He pauses for a few seconds, hurt coloring his eyes and darkening his features, but then his shoulders drop a little bit, resigned. “I deserve that.”

“You do,” she says, her tone a little dark. “We all thought you were dead. Who knows about this? Just Bruce?  Or does anyone else know?”

“Just Bruce.” Dick looks completely ashamed of himself, and Barbara feels good to see him looking so down trod like this.  _Good_ , she thinks. _Good_. “I wanted to tell you—“

“But you couldn’t,” she finishes for him with a trace of bitterness. “I know. I’ve heard it all before.”

“I really wanted to,” he tries, taking a step forward but stopping when her icy green eyes dart up to him. “Please…I did.  I didn’t want to leave.  Do you know how it’s felt to feel like I’ve been betraying my family this whole time?  Betraying Bruce? Tim?  You?  Barbara…I’m trying to protect you.  The whole family. And I know you’d do the same thing if you were in my position because that’s just who you are.”

Barbara hates him for pulling out the “if you were in my shoes” card against her, and her expression turns poisonous. “Don’t put this back on me.”

“Do you think this has been easy for me?“ Dick demands, finally starting to get a little fed up. “Do you think I enjoyed being told that I had to go undercover and let the people I loved think I was dead?  Because I really didn’t enjoy that, Barbara. I didn’t enjoy it then, and I don’t enjoy it now.”

“I didn’t say you enjoyed it,” she snaps back, feeling every bit as childish as she sounds. “I’m not saying that you had it easier than any of us because God knows you’ll fight me for saying it, but things weren’t that easy when we found out you were _dead_ , Dick. First Damian and then you, and—“

She shakes her to head to cut herself off, and she covers her face with her hands.  Even from this distance she can smell his soap, and she wants to punch him for it. Her mind races, telling her that none of this is real.  She must have taken a pipe to the head back at that building, or she must have eaten something weird that’s given her food poisoning, and this is all a fever-induced hallucination. She tries telling herself all of these things, but she can still smell Dick’s annoying fucking soap, and she knows it’s real.  Slowly, she opens her eyes.

“What were you doing at that building?” she asks, her voice calm now. “Who was that man?”

“An asset to Spyral.  I’ve been tracking him for a few days now.”

“And what happened to him after we left?”

“My people picked him up, and now they’re probably either trying to find me, or they’re taking my word that I’ll meet them at our next point.”

Barbara frowns, and she leans away from him a little bit. “You keep talking about your people.  That’s Spyral? Your co-workers?”

“In a sense.”

“You’re being so secretive about this.” She sounds more accusing than she means it to be, and she catches the look of frustration that passes over Dick’s face.

“I can’t let anything happen to you.  If they figure out where I am…”

“So you’re telling me none of that fancy equipment you have on you has a tracking device on it?”

“I disabled all the trackers before we left the building.”

“And the back ups?” she presses.  Dick’s never been as good at technology as she is, and it’d be just like him to forget to disable the back ups.

“And the back ups.”

So he’s learning.

“And they won’t find you?”

“Not right now.”

“Spyral’s a dangerous company.”

“I know.  That’s why I’m trying to protect you.”

Barbara knows he’s telling the truth, but she doesn’t want to hear it, so she shakes her head. Silence passes between them, and neither seems to know what to say.  She’s angry. God, she’s so angry she could scream. But she’s also glad. Deep down, she’s breathing a sigh of relief that he’s alive because she never thought she’d see him alive again. Ever.  She thought he was dead, and yet here he is before her alive and well and…and _him_.

Everything she’s feeling—all the confusion, the anger, the grief, and even that bit of joy she feels at seeing him alive again—all of it starts bubbling towards the surface, and she blinks back the tears as they came rushing back up faster than before.  Angry, she looks away from him to hide her face because she knows if he sees her, he’ll know she understands.  And she does. She doesn’t, but at the same time, she _does_.

“Barbara…” He takes a step towards her, every gesture of his body looking as though it’s screaming with helplessness. “Please.”

“And all because of a stupid spy organization,” she says bitterly.

“They’re trying to unmask us all...and with a man on the inside—“ Dick stops talking when Barbara finally looks at him.  She lets him see her face, and he goes quiet because he knows she gets it. She’s always known how to get the best reaction out of him, how to make him react the way she wanted him to, and she uses that to her advantage now.

“I _know_ , Dick,” she says softly. “I do.  But I can’t…I can’t just make all the pain go away.  I can’t just forget that I thought you were dead.  I’m not as good at looking forward as you are.”

“That can be a good quality,” he offers.

“It’s not very good right now.” Tears brim up high and bright in Barbara’s eyes and make them look extra green and glassy.  Angrily, she wipes them away and takes a heavy breath. She doesn’t want him to see her cry, but she knows it’s inevitable.  She may be stubborn, but she can admit when she’s lost a fight. And without a doubt, she’s lost this one. Awkwardly, Dick moves towards her, but then he stops.  He starts again, pauses, retreats, and then he stands still.

“I can’t stand it when you cry,” he says, his voice soft. “Barbara…”

He can never seem to get past more than saying her name, Barbara’s noticed, and she realizes she likes that.  She’s missed hearing him say her name, and in a way, it’s worse to hear him call her Barbara than it is to hear him call her Babs.  As a particularly hard, angry sob shakes her body, she wipes her face again.

“Can I…?” He steps towards her, holding his arms out as if he wants to hug her, and she violently shakes her head.  She watches him lower his arms, and it’s like her heart tears in two. Suddenly, she changes her mind, and she nods.  Dick hesitates, but then he goes to her.  He walks towards her, and he gingerly sits on the edge of her bed.  He’s so close now that she can catch faint hints of his shampoo in the air, but he’s still far enough so that he doesn’t overwhelm her with being too close.

Carefully, he reaches out, and he puts a hand on her shoulder. The touch is almost afraid, too shy, but after a moment, he warms up, and it turns comfortable. Barbara longs to lean into his arms and have him hug her like he used to when they were younger. All the times they’d been kids and flirted with each other, always teasing, always testing the waters to see how far they could go without being rejected.  Yet they’d never rejected each other.  Not really.  They’d once agreed that their timing was bad, and yes, that was true.  They’d never had good timing, but it was also true that there would never _be_ good timing.

 _So why not_ , Barbara had asked him a long time ago. _Why not_.

And she finally gives in.  She lets him put his arm fully around her shoulders, and she lets herself lean into him. If she hadn’t known before that he was really Dick, she would know it now.  He’s so familiar to her that she can close her eyes and know what part of him she’s touching, know that her head is currently rested in that space between his shoulder and his neck.  She’s unbearably close to him, and it’s dangerous—God, it’s dangerous, and she knows it, but she’s never been good at protecting herself.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I’m so sorry, Barbara.”

She doesn’t know what compels her to do it, but she reaches up and touches his face.  Leaning towards him, she tells herself that she’s going to kiss his cheek—just a friendly welcome home kiss that won’t mean anything, but suddenly, he turns his head just a fraction, and she turns hers just a fraction, and their lips are lightly pressed together.  She can’t answer the screaming questions in her brain that demand answers from her as to why she’s doing this, why she’s acting this way, but she turns them off, and she keeps pressing forward.  Dick kisses her back, every bit as light as she’s kissing him.  It’s like Barbara’s dreaming.  She can see all of this clearly, and yet she feels like she’s outside of her body despite the fact that she’s feeling it so acutely.  She feels Dick’s hands in her hair, his mouth on hers. She feels his kiss and the warmth of his skin.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, a litany against her lips. “I’m so sorry. God, I’m so sorry.”

Suddenly, Barbara stops.  Dick notices, and he immediately stops, too, but he looks at her with confusion. He’s too much of a gentleman to press the issue or accuse her of leading him on, but she knows he’s confused. Barbara closes her eyes for a few seconds, and she just takes a moment to breathe.  Her heart feels like it’s about to pound right out of her chest, and she doesn’t know how to stop it.  She feels overwhelmed to the point where her head is fuzzy, making it hard for her to focus.

“Barbara?” Dick asks, noticing her behavior.

“I’m ok,” she says, but she drops her hands from his face. She’s got to shut her body off. Shut down her hormones and get back in her head.  God, she doesn’t know how she lost control like this.  She wants him. Jesus, Barbara wants him, but now isn’t the time.  She doesn’t know what’s going on, and she can’t risk doing anything when she doesn’t understand her current situation.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, but this time he’s not just referring to his sudden resurrection.

“Do you want tea?” she blurts out. “Or coffee?”

“I’m fine,” he says, still hesitating around her. “Barbara, are you sure—“

“You always liked coffee.” She’s trying for some kind of normal now, but what even _is_ normal? Quickly, she stands up and starts rummaging around for some of her street clothes. “I want a cup of coffee. I’ll bring you one.”

Dick goes to protest, but he doesn’t.  He’s confused, and she can see it all in his body.  How he’s holding back, fighting to keep from asking her again if she’s asking, forcing his apology down so he doesn’t sound like a broken record. “Ok.”

“I’ve got some clothes around here that’ll probably fit you, too,” she adds, digging into one of her drawers.  Finally, she finds a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, and she throws them at him. “We have a lot of parties here, and clothes seem to just linger, so for whatever reason, I’ve got a bunch of random clothes that don’t fit me. So here.  In case you wanted to get out of your tactical clothes before you come out.  If you want to come out. You don’t have to come out. But if you do.”

She’s babbling by this point, but her mouth is moving without consulting her head on anything.  Her cheeks are red as she turns away from him to change.  Again, Dick is a gentleman, and he turns his face so he doesn’t see her change. They both know he’s seen her out of her uniform, but he still looks away out of respect. Every time she’s changed around him in the past, they were friends.  He doesn’t know what they are now.

“Sorry,” she mumbles when she’s in a pair of yoga pants and a teal colored tank top that looks so lovely with her eyes. “It’s nothing you haven’t seen before. Just…”

“No, you don’t have to…” Dick’s voice trails off as they both realize they understand each other.  Then Barbara nods, and she goes to the door.

“Coffee,” she mutters. “I’ll get us coffee.”

And then she’s gone, leaving Dick to change and to figure out where the hell he’s supposed to go from here.


	2. Questions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recommended listening:  
> "Smother" – Daughter  
> “Swinging Party” - Lorde
> 
> Feedback is greatly appreciated!
> 
> Enjoy =)

When Barbara comes back, Dick answers questions.  She asks him about Spyral, what he’s doing, what he’s planning. She asks him whatever he’ll tell her, and he gives her all the answers he can.  In return, however, he asks her the same things. He asks her about her life since he’s been gone, and she gets to fill him in on the things Bruce has neglected to mention.  She tells him about Bruce's memory, and she pretends she doesn't see the pain in his eyes as she answers his questions about his adoptive father.  Just like that, they’re talking.

It’s late into the night when Barbara starts yawning and looking sleepy. She’s refilled three times on coffee, Dick an additional two times, and she’s so tired.  But she doesn’t stop talking.  She doesn’t stop talking and asking until she can’t keep her eyes open any longer. Even then, she doesn’t want to go to sleep because she’s terrified that when she wakes up, Dick won’t be there, and her suspicion that this has all been a dream will be true.

“Sleep,” Dick tells her after a while.  As if he knows what’s on her mind, his voice goes softer. “I’ll still be here.”

“What are you going to do?” she asks, trying not to sound so sleepy. “Are you going to stay?”

“Yeah. I’ll stay.”

“Don’t you have to go back to Spyral?”

“Not right now.” He’s lying, and she probably knows he’s lying, but she doesn’t ask, and he doesn’t tell.

“So you’ll really be here?”

“Yeah. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I do.  Let it be my penance.”

“That’s not funny.” She’s yawning, wishing she could fight him, but she doesn’t have the energy.

“Sure it is,” he replies, but Barbara’s already asleep. When he lies down on the floor to sleep, he thinks about all the shit he’ll be in when Helena finds him, but he doesn’t care.  He can’t find it in him to care when he’s here with Barbara.  Not like this.

* * *

Eventually, morning comes, and Barbara wakes up around 11.  Only half a second goes by before she remembers last night, and she sits up in bed, still sleepy but suddenly alert.  Dick isn’t on the floor.  Her heart constricts, and her throat tightens, but Dick isn’t there. She sits in shock for a few seconds as she tries to process it, tries to stop the hurt building up in her chest, but then she hears his laughter.  Dick’s laugh followed by Frankie’s draws her attention, and she quickly bolts out of the room and out to the kitchen.

By the time she gets to the kitchen, she realizes that yesterday wasn’t a dream.  There’s Dick standing at the stove like he’s always been there and Frankie sitting in her usual chair at the island, looking completely enraptured by Dick Grayson. Inwardly, Barbara smirks. _I know the feeling_.

Dick turns over his shoulder when he hears her, and it’s like he’s come back from the dead all over again.  His black hair is tousled up over his head, and he’s still got a little bit of sleepiness left on his face, but otherwise, he looks like Dick.  He’s still there, and he’s still alive.  He’s also still wearing the sweatpants and t-shirt she gave him yesterday, and she hates him because he looks good in them.

“Hey, Babes,” Frankie greets. “We thought you weren’t going to wake up.”

“Oh. Long night,” Barbara says, shifting a bit.  Frankie’s eyebrows shoot up, and Barbara’s cheeks flush as she realizes Frankie interprets that in a slightly different way than she’d originally meant it. “We had a lot of talking to do.”

“I made some breakfast, Babes,” Dick says with a small Grayson smirk on his face as he borrows Frankie’s endearment for her.  Barbara wants to slap it off him because he looks like his old self, like he’s _loving_ Frankie’s misunderstanding, but she can’t do anything but half-smile back at him.

“His eggs are shit, and he burns the bacon, but hey, it’s food,” Frankie says.

“I didn’t mess up the coffee, though,” he argues.

“No, you didn’t.” Frankie grins up at Barbara. “I learned all kinds of things about you, Batgirl.  Lots of fun new stories I’ll always hold against you.”

“No.” Barbara shoots Dick a look, and Frankie laughs.

“No, don’t worry.  He didn’t say a thing about it.  I’m just trying to get that red head temperament of yours to come out.” Frankie stands up and grabs the mug that’s closest to her. “I’ll leave you guys now.  I just smelled food out here and wanted to investigate. Thanks for the breakfast, Dick.”

“Anytime, Frankie.” Dick flashes her another smile, and Frankie returns it as she leaves, sending a wink Barbara’s way when she passes her. Barbara glowers at her, but she doesn’t really mean it, and she knows Frankie knows she doesn’t mean it. Quietly, almost timidly, she crosses to the kitchen table and sits down.

“So your cooking hasn’t improved,” she says.

“No.” Dick gives her a genuine smile, even if it’s a small one. “But like Frankie said…it’s food.”

“So…what were you guys…talking about?” Barbara asks, feeling lame and uncomfortable.  She feels like this is the Morning After, but it’s not like they even did anything last night. Sure, they’d kissed, but she’s not even going to think about that right now.  She’d been in an emotionally vulnerable place, and so had Dick. Neither of them had been thinking.

“You. Frankie was telling me about your algorithm and your studies.  It sounds like you’ve got a good life going,” he replies. Barbara nods, meaning it.

“Yeah,” she answers thoughtfully. “I do. I mean…things are going well. I enjoy my classes and working on my algorithm.  I enjoy doing Batgirl things, even if my last enemy was myself.”

“Frankie told me.”

“Oh, I bet.”

“That sounds like you, though,” he says.  When she gives him a perplexed look, he crosses back to the table with a plate of breakfast food.  He slides it to her along with a mug, and he sits down. “You’re always your own worst enemy.”

“Aren’t we all?” she asks with a mild snort. “Look at _you_ , Boy Wonder.  You’re one to talk.”

“Touche.” He looks at her as she eats, and he smiles again when she makes a face. “Frankie’s assessment of my cooking pretty accurate?”

“Yeah. But I’ll eat it because it’s breakfast, and I’m hungry.” Barbara keeps eating, and Dick just sits quietly. The silence isn’t comfortable, but it’s not _un_ comfortable, either. Barbara doesn’t know how to act around him, and yet she feels like he’s always been the person she’s felt most natural around.  She keeps eating, and he keeps drinking, and then she sets her fork down. “So what are you going to do now?”

“Hmm?” he asks as if he doesn’t know what she’s asking.

“About everything?  Spyral? You said you didn’t have to go back last night…what are your people going to think?  They’re going to storm this place looking for you.”

“Well, I told them I had some things to take care of, and I’d meet up with them at our next location,” he says, his tone making it seem like that’s the most obvious excuse in the world.  Barbara doesn’t buy it, and she frowns at him.

“So this super dangerous spy organization will just let you declare that you’re going dark without giving them any warning beforehand, and they won’t come after you trying to see what’s up?”

“When you put it like that…”

“Yeah, Dick, it’s not…your best idea,” she says, trying to word it nicely. Dick’s mouth twists a little bit, and he shifts in his seat.

“I’m hoping by this point they’ll know not to come after me. They’re not known for letting their agents do what they want, but…” He shrugs and looks down a little bit, hiding his blue eyes from her. “I couldn’t leave last night.”

Barbara senses that they’re about to get into serious territory again, and she feels her guard go shooting back up.  After this semi-comfortable morning they’ve had together, she’s not sure she wants to talk about things like this right now.  Not now.  Not after they’ve just had breakfast together without tears or confrontation. Primly, she brings her coffee mug to her mouth, and she takes a sip before lowering it back down.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she says.  Again, Dick looks confused, but he doesn’t say anything. He just lets her go again.

As Barbara showers, she knows she can’t keep this up forever. She can’t keep running away from him and avoiding the topic whenever things get too serious. She _knows_ it, and she _knows_ she’s not a runner.  She’s been taught to stand up and fight, but when it comes to Dick, after all the anguish she’s dealt with since learning of his “death,” she wants to run to avoid it all.

And she has questions.  Good Lord does she have questions.  Who sent her the address?  Where did the number come from? Was it on purpose? Was she supposed to find Dick? Was it from a friendly or a non-friendly?  She has all of these questions, but neither she nor Dick has the answer. When she’d thrown them all to him last night, he’d had no clue.  He’d been sent to that location by Spyral, and she’d shown up, and then there they were.

Barbara leaves the shower and lets Dick take one, giving him a towel to use while he’s there.  He thanks her, and then he ducks into the bathroom while Barbara retreats to her room. Dick Grayson is in the shower down the hall.  Dick Grayson is very naked and very exposed in the shower.  She can’t believe she’s thinking about things like that at this time, so she wipes the thoughts from her head as best as she can, which isn’t very well at all. Then again, she’s always admired Dick’s body and thought certain inappropriate things about him. At least _that_ hasn’t changed.

A few not so short moments later, Dick comes out fresh and clean, though he’s still wearing the same clothes she gave him yesterday. Barbara wants to ask him how long he’s staying, but she doesn’t want to know the answer. She doesn’t want to know when he’ll leave.  Again.

Barbara takes one look at him, and she sees how his dark, dark hair flops a little bit in the front, weighted down by the water.  It’s hanging in his eyes just the smallest amount, and her instinct is to go push it out of the way.  If Dick notices her looking at him, he doesn’t comment on it. They’re both quiet, just kind of trying to figure the other one out.  And before Barbara can think twice, she blurts out, “I’m sorry about last night.”

Dick looks surprised, but he recovers himself. “No…no _I’m_ sorry.”

“No. _I_ kissed _you_.”

“I kissed you back.”

“Still. I probably shouldn’t have.”

“Yeah,” he says a little vaguely.

“So…sorry.”

“I didn’t mind.”

She looks at him and sees him fighting a tiny smile. “You’re the worst.”

“Our timing is the worst,” he corrects.

“Yeah, you come back from the dead, and I kiss you when I’m crying.”

“Hey, at least you kissed me.”

Barbara’s thrown a little off by that admission, but she doesn’t say anything. She remembers how he asked her to move to Chicago with him before he “died.”  She remembers how she’d been willing to work things out with him. She remembers so much of their history together, and she can’t forget it— _couldn’t_ forget it even if she wanted to.  Beneath the pain and the grief of his “death,” she can’t forget everything they’d done and planned together.

“I’m going to try to track that number,” she says, again changing the subject. “I want to know where I got that text from and why.”

“I’m pretty damn curious to know, too,” Dick adds.  Barbara looks up and steals one last glance at him. He usually wears his clothes so damn tight, but in her oversized clothes, he looks good.  With his t-shirt hanging off him a little bit, he looks younger and nowhere near as stressed as he does on an every day basis. Barbara likes this, but she decides not to tell him.  It’ll go to his head.

Instead, she reaches out, grabs her laptop, and she gets right to work. Dick has always liked to watch her work whenever she does computer things.  Sometimes he learns things, but most of the time he just likes to watch her and see what she does.  It used to be nice when they were younger—having him over her shoulder and calmly taking it all in.  And now, as she starts trying to break past all of the barriers set up around tracking the mystery text message, having Dick watch her is like going back into their past.

* * *

 

Barbara works for hours and doesn’t get too far.  For the most part, Dick is quiet.  Every now and then he’ll bring something up, a question or a comment about what she’s doing, but he knows better than to bother her, so he doesn’t.  Barbara thinks maybe they should talk, catch up a little bit more, but she doesn’t know what to say. She feels so tongue-tied around him now that she can barely get anything out.  She didn’t seem to be too tongue-tied last night, she thinks with a flash of bitterness as she catches Dick looking at her face.

And then Barbara finds the truth.  She finds out the source of the text message, and it’s like someone poured water on her head.  Dick sees her face, and he watches the color drain from it.

“Barbara?”

“I traced the text,” she says slowly.  Dick moves towards her, his face worried and drawn.

“Who sent it?” he asked.

“The phone’s registered to Bruce.”

Dick goes quiet then, and Barbara turns the laptop around so he can see. His blue eyes skim over the screen before returning to her face. “How’s that possible?”

“I…don’t know.” Barbara turns the screen back towards her. “Why would he do that? Why would he text me your location? And it couldn't have been Bruce...he doesn't remember you or anyone. Did Bruce know where you were going to be and when before he lost his memory?”

Dick shifts just an inch.  “Kind of. I told him about it. Well, at least I used our private line and spoke into it, even if I didn't get an answer back. Thought he’d want to keep the guy Spyral was taking in on his own radar, so I gave him a heads up a while ago.”

“And then someone texted me?” Barbara frowns hard at her screen, and she props her chin in her hand as she leans her elbow against her knee. “Who do that?  And if for whatever tiny chance it's Bruce, why does he want me to know you’re alive?  I have _no interest at all_ in Spyral.  I hadn’t even heard of them until you mentioned them yesterday.”

“If his memory came back, I don’t think he'd want you to be a part of Spyral,” Dick says, though he doesn’t look totally convinced. “I don’t…I don’t know why he'd send you that information.”

“Neither do I.  And even if it really _was_ him, it’s not like I can just pick up a phone and call him.  And whoever did it...why the secrecy?  Why didn’t they want me to know the plan?” She pauses for a second and then sighs, all the tension leaving her body. “Why didn’t Bruce tell me _anything?_ ”

“To protect you.”

She sighs again and leans back against the pillows on her bed. “I know. All of this has been to protect the masks.  I know that, Dick. I do.” She puts her hand up to rub her eyes, and she closes them to rest them for a second. “But that doesn’t make any of this easier to understand.”

“He's always trusted you a lot more than he’s let on, and this time...he’s got something really huge planned that he can’t say. Something he probably had in motion before he ever lost his memory,” Dick says.  Barbara shoots him a knowing look, and she folds her arms over her chest.

“Of course.” She heaves a frustrated sigh and rubs her eyes a bit. “But if everything’s such a giant secret, why now? What was it about this mission other than the fact that you were in Burnside that made whoever's in on this secret decide it was ok for me to know you were alive?  That’s just not making any sense to me.”

“Nor to me.”

Barbara makes a frustrated grumbling sound and returns to her laptop, typing furiously. “What was so special about this guy you had to bring him in?”

“I don’t know.  I wasn’t told. All I know is he’s smart, he’s capable, and he was hiding out so we couldn’t find him,” Dick replies. Barbara digs deeper and deeper into the Internet, and Dick is quiet beside her.  He answers her questions whenever she asks them, and she has a lot because she’s trying to track something major.

“Would your people know what he does?” she asks.

“My people wouldn’t tell me anything.  At least nothing more than what they’ve already told me.”

“And you just take no for an answer.”

Dick gives her a look that makes her wish she hadn’t even asked. Chastened with just a glance, she’s reminded of how he can be so like Bruce.  But she won’t tell him that, though, because it’ll ruin their day. Because their day was going so perfectly before.

There are things she hasn’t told him, things she’s keeping to herself. She has so many words left to say to him about how she’s felt these years he’s been gone, but she won’t say them. She can’t.  Dick doesn’t need to know, and she doesn’t need to tell him because this little rendezvous he’s taking with her isn’t permanent. Funny, she thinks, he was always the one thing she’d thought of as permanent.  Yet she knows that nothing is ever permanent for members of the Batfamily. Nothing ever is, no matter how much she thought he was.

She hasn’t told him of just how much she grieved him. She told him she missed him last night, but she hasn’t told him the extent of it.  And again, he doesn’t need to know.  What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and Barbara uses that as her motto just then.  Chancing a quick glance, she allows herself to peek over at Dick, and she finds him dozing off. Typical, she thinks with a sigh. Dick has always been the kind to randomly fall asleep, especially on a bed, and Barbara made the mistake of letting him sit on her bed earlier.

It’s not a mistake.  She didn’t make a mistake.  There’s just a natural easiness, a natural intimacy that exists between them, and even after all this time apart, they haven’t quite lost it.  Barbara’s able to admit to herself that she likes that part about the both of them.  Despite everything, a few things are the same, and this is one of the things she’s glad has continued to exist.

But out of everything that _isn’t_ the same, she notices the way he sleeps.  She’s seen him sleep before.  In the Batcave, at the Wayne Manor, on his couch…she’s seen him sleep plenty of times.  However, he looks different now.  He looks like he’s waiting for an enemy to come in and attack him because he’s still got that tension in his shoulders.  The expression on his face even looks tense, unsure of whether or not he’s safe enough to truly relax.

He has more lines in his face now, lines that Barbara can tell didn’t get there by smiling.  They’re lines he doesn’t deserve but has unfortunately earned.  Yet even with all the tension and the new minor details to his face, he still looks like Dick.  Quickly, Barbara looks away.  If he woke up and saw her staring at him while he slept, he’d never let her live it down.

After a few more minutes of trying to search, Barbara feels her eyelids start to droop.  She tries to keep them open because she can’t afford to lose any time on searching for answers, but after the ridiculously late night she had last night plus the emotional exhaustion she’s facing after these past 36 hours, she could really use a nap, too. And napping with Dick isn’t weird, she tells herself as she sets her laptop off to the side. They’ve napped together before, the both of them falling asleep during a movie or after they’d had a long night out patrolling Gotham.  Napping is innocent, and there’s nothing wrong with it, she thinks, and it’s the last thought she has before she’s gone.


	3. Fusion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Recommended listening:  
> "Harbour Lights" - A Silent Film  
> "Work Song" - Hozier
> 
> Again, feedback is always appreciated!
> 
> Enjoy! =)

Barbara sees scenes from Dick’s funeral.  She sees Bruce’s face in front of her.  He’d been so stoic, so solid, but he’d been grieving, or so she’d thought. She sees everyone at the funeral, and they’re all crying.  Everyone’s crying except for her and Bruce, but she can’t let herself cry—if she starts, she’ll never stop.  Images of Dick dying splatter the back of her eyelids, and she can’t break free from them. Dick dying in every way, shape, and form.  She sees it all.

“Babs, I’m here,” Dream-Dick says to her.

“You’re not real,” she says back.

“Babs, I never left.” He reaches for her.

“You’re not real.” She pulls back.

“Babs, I’m not leaving you.”

“You’re not _real_.”

Dream-Barbara launches for Dream-Dick, but she never gets to tackle him. Suddenly, she feels something holding her down, and she jerks awake, starting to go into defensive mode.

“Barbara, hey,” Dick says.  He’s real. Real-Dick is here, and he’s looking down at her with concern and a little bit of panic in his eyes. Barbara stares up at him, her chest heaving and sweat pouring from every pore in her body. “Hey. Hey, you’re all right.”

“Oh, God,” she says, and she sits up a little bit.  Dick’s hands stay on her, but he doesn’t go to touch her any more than he already is. “Shit.  Shit. Sorry.”

“Are you ok?” he asks.

“Yeah. I’m…I’m ok.” She’s shaken by her dream, but she doesn’t want him to know, though judging by how he’s looking at her, she’s doing a bad job of hiding it.

“Bad dreams?” he asks, his voice a little softer.

“Something like that.” She runs a hand over her face, all the while feeling those ice blue eyes of his on her face.  Sighing, she drops her hand. “Weird as it sounds, I had dreams about your funeral.”

“My funeral,” he repeats, not a question but a mildly confused statement.

“Yeah. You had a pretty big turn out.”

He looks troubled by this, but he doesn’t say anything. He just frowns. “Oh. I hadn’t thought too much about my funeral.” Barbara doesn’t respond, her eyes distant, and he tries again. “Bruce said it was nice.”

“It was.  Very elaborate.” She draws her knees into her chest, and she hugs them a little bit. Dick sits beside her, and finally, he lowers his hands away from her arms.  Barbara feels the cool air left behind, and she already misses his touch. “I think I still have the program somewhere if you want to see it.”

She _knows_ she has the program, but she doesn’t tell him that just yet.

“Not sure if I’m ready for that.” He tries to smile, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.  They keep sitting in silence, and then he shifts forward. “Barbara…”

“I think Bruce and I were probably the only people who didn’t cry at your funeral, and I know for me, it was because I’d cried myself out by that point. I just…I couldn’t stop crying,” she says suddenly, her voice soft. “Before the funeral, that is. I guess Bruce didn’t cry because he knew you weren’t really dead.”

“He still wasn’t happy about what happened,” Dick says, as if that’s supposed to make up for it. “He didn’t like asking me to do this.”

“I know,” she says, repeating what feels like her mantra when it comes to talking about what Dick has to do now. “But I didn’t know then. And I couldn’t stop crying, and I couldn’t stop thinking about this future I’d come up with you…” Her voice trails off, and she shakes her head a little bit. When she speaks again, she’s a little louder, a little faster. “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. You…you were supposed to come back to Gotham, and we were supposed to be Nightwing and Batgirl, part of the Batfamily again for old times’ sake. And—and I don’t know, maybe we were supposed to have good timing for once…or at least get to where it wasn’t _too_ bad, and we were supposed to…I don’t know. But _this_ … _this_ wasn’t supposed to happen, Dick.  And I couldn’t stop thinking about that when I found out you were dead.  I started crying, and I just…I couldn’t stop it.  I missed you the second you left, and I missed you like a kid misses its favorite toy when it gets lost forever.” Her voice cracks a little bit, and her cheeks burn. “I _missed_ you.”

Dick’s quiet for a few moments, and then he speaks. “Barbara.”

There’s something new in his tone, and Barbara finds herself looking up at him, looking directly in his eyes.  He’s wearing an expression she can’t read, and not being able to read it frustrates her to no end—she likes knowing what he’s thinking, but as she looks at him now, she has no idea.

“When I saw you a few weeks ago,” he starts out slowly. “That mission was one of the most difficult ones I’ve ever had to complete.”

“Spyral not working you hard enough?” she asks in an attempt to joke.

Dick doesn’t smile, nor does he waver. “Because of you, Barbara. Walking away from you without telling you I was alive…that’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.  And my number one hard task was leaving you all in the first place.  I’ve missed you this whole time, but when I saw you, and you had a brand new costume and that same smart ass attitude, it hit me harder than…well, harder than a ton of bricks.  God.” He runs his hand over his face. “I’m sorry.  For everything. And I’m sorry I’m telling you all of this now and just unloading on you.”

“No,” she says softly. “No, Dick, it’s ok.”

“Is it?” he asks, and she knows he’s not just referring to opening up to her now.

“It is,” she says, her voice still the same.  Silent, giving away nothing on her face, she reaches out, and she takes his hand. “It’s ok, Boy Wonder.”

Finally, a slow Dick Grayson smile spreads over his face, and he squeezes her hand back.  Barbara doesn’t know if she’s imagining it, but she could swear he’s leaning closer to her. He couldn’t be, though. He wouldn’t lean closer to her, and yet it seems that he is.  She doesn’t know how it happens or what propels him to do it, but she knows his lips are inches away from hers and then centimeters, and then they’re kissing.

His mouth is warm and soft, and she can taste every smile he’s ever tossed her way.  She can also taste the words he’s shouted, the tension in his jaw that tells her he’s not 100% at ease. As carefully as if she’s touching a breakable piece of stained glass, she lifts her hand and places it along his jawline.  Her palm cups his muscle, and she can feel the lightest bit of stubble against her skin. Dick kisses her so slowly and so sweetly, Barbara feels tears in her eyes, and she squeezes them shut so she doesn’t cry.  She doesn’t want to cry while she kisses Dick Grayson, so she tries to focus on him and not how sweet he’s being.

“I’m sorry,” he says, pulling back a little.

“No,” she says, and she pulls him back in with the smallest tug. “I missed you.”

Dick kisses her again, and she realizes his arms as they go around her. “God, I missed you, Babs.”

“I didn’t give you Babs rights again.” She shouldn’t kiss him. She knows she shouldn’t, but he’s so warm, and she’s missed him so much.  Despite what she knows is rational, she keeps kissing him.

“Babs,” he says gently against her lips. “Babs.”

Barbara can’t take him saying her name like that, and she pushes him back, rolling with him so she’s on top of him.  Just like old days, she thinks, though in the old days they’d gotten in this position when sparring.  When she’d ended up like this, straddling him and so close to his body she’d felt just short of swooning, she’d won.  Years later, as she straddles him now and loses herself in the next kiss, she still feels a sense of victory work its way down her spine in a cool, trickling stream.

When her pelvis settles over his hips, she briefly thinks about making a dick joke, really hamming it up and playing off his name, but she’s enjoying kissing him too much to do anything _but_ kiss. His hands trail up the sides of her legs, and then she feels his palms lightly grab her hips.  He touches her as though he’s afraid she’s going to break, and if he were anyone other than Dick, Barbara would feel annoyed. But he’s Dick, and she can’t be annoyed with him, so she bites a little on his lower lip to urge him on.

Dick’s lips move harder against hers, and his grip tightens. Even while looking sleepy in a t-shirt and sweatpants, he’s beautiful.  Barbara wants to tell him, but she doesn’t.  She just kisses.  Finally, she lets her own hands wander.  Her hands skim over his shoulders, down his chest, and across his ribs.  All she does is touch him.  Still careful, Dick puts his hands up under the hem of her shirt at her back. His fingers are calloused and nimble as they run over her skin, and again, Barbara feels a chill run down her spine.

She wants to feel him touch her, and she pulls back just long enough to pull her shirt up and over her head, tossing it to the floor without even looking at it.  Dick, however, is looking directly at her.  He’s seen her in various states of undress before, but this is new.  Seeing her like this is different.  His gorgeous eyes stay glued to her as he looks her over completely, and then his hands trail up her sides until he’s cupping her breasts in his hands.

“Damn, Batgirl,” he mumbles with a small grin.

“Boy Wonder,” she returns, a little breathless as she sits back on his hips just enough to apply the tiniest bit of pressure more directly over the most sensitive part of his body.  His eyes flutter just a bit, but he grins up at her even more. After that, they melt into a warm seamlessness of kissing and undressing.  Barbara takes note of how easily Dick gets her bra open, how graceful he is when he removes her yoga pants and underwear. She’s not quite as smooth as she usually is, and she mentally docks off Babs points, but she manages to get Dick’s clothes off without making an ass out of herself.  And once she has him naked beneath her, that’s all that matters.

The first time she touches him, reaches her hand down between them and takes him in her palm, he closes his eyes.  She’s never pegged him as the kind of guy who’d let her take control, but he easily gives it up to her as she moves her hand up and down his length, stroking him and driving him crazy already.  While she’d love to just watch his face as she touches him, she doesn’t spend too much time here because she wants him, and she can see in the way he’s breathing that he wants her, too. Grabbing a condom from her nightstand drawer quicker than lightning itself, she tears it open, rolls it on him, and she moves. She moves, and he moves, and it’s so easy for her to just ease back a few inches and take him inside her.

Barbara doesn’t slow down or go still.  Instead, she’s quick to set a rough, steady pace and go with it. She places her hands on Dick’s chest, and she moves over him in long, arching waves.  As she moves, she looks at every part of him. His muscles rise and dip in gentle swells and valleys, showing just how toned he is in every part of his perfect form. He’s built like a god, and she loves remembering the days when he’d been shorter than her, barely thicker than a toothpick.  Thank God his days as Robin are over, she thinks with a small, private smile. Looking at him now, she never would have known that he’d once been a skinny, scrawny little wisp of a kid. Looking at him now, he just looks so fucking beautiful she can barely stand it.

Dick’s grip on her hips tightens, and he moves underneath her, countering her movements.  Even if he’s flat on his back, he’s making sure this is a team effort.  Barbara appreciates that about him, and she makes sure she tells him by kissing him hard on the mouth.  He’s such a good kisser, and damn, if that doesn’t make her move a little faster and a little harder.  He’s thick and hard between her legs, and every time she lowers down, she takes him inside her a little deeper.

Without any warning, Dick slides his arms around Barbara’s lower back, and in one smooth movement that doesn’t alter their pace or their flow, he flips them so he’s on top.  Barbara feels the cool sheets against her back, and she looks up at Dick as he thrusts into her. She wraps her legs around his waist and closes her eyes, taking a moment just to feel him moving inside her.

“Babs,” he murmurs low and gentle in her ear.  She presses her cheek against his just a little bit, and she’s surprised to find the slightest hint of a smile in the way his cheek tenses against hers. One of his hands drifts to her thigh, and he pushes it open, moving into her harder and deeper. With the way he’s moving his hips against her, it’s not going to take her long until she peaks, and he knows it. Barbara grips at him. She wraps her arms and her legs around his body, and she pushes her fingers through his thick black hair as he pushes them both to orgasm.  His body’s moving against hers so beautifully, and the thought crosses Barbara’s mind that at some point in the future, she wants to see just how far and flexible Circus Boy can go.

Warmth pools in Barbara’s stomach, and before she can stop herself, she’s whimpering just a bit against Dick’s temple while he kisses her neck. He takes her closer, and she goes with him until she locks her thighs against his waist and arches her back as her orgasm ripples through her body.  Seconds later, Dick comes behind her, his mouth buried hot against her neck and his hips pressed all the way against her.  They’re quiet as they finish out their orgasms.  Barbara keeps her arms locked tight around him, and she shuts her eyes so she doesn’t have to see anything but the hazy swirl of colors behind her eyelids.

What surprises her most of all is the fact that Dick holds her back just as tightly.  Dick’s slept with lots of women.  _Lots_ of women.  Barbara’s never been under any other impression, and really, she’s ok with that. She’s teased him about it in the past, and he’s always just kind of looked proud and a little bit embarrassed all at the same time.  She knows he’s slept around, but she never would have thought he’d be the kind of person to hold onto her this closely.

Gently, she starts to play with his hair.  This is territory she and Dick have never entered before, and it feels weird but strangely natural all at once.  Dick rests his head against her chest, his dark hair contrasting against her light skin.  After a few moments, he lifts his head and eases off of her, moving just enough to dispose of the condom in the trashcan by Barbara’s bed.  When he returns to her, he puts his arms back around her and pulls her into him. For a moment, Barbara can’t even think, can’t find the words to say as she really breathes in his scent.

“God, I missed you, Boy Wonder,” she mumbles.  This time when tears fill her eyes, she doesn’t hate herself for them, nor does she hate Dick for holding her just a little bit closer.

“I missed you, too, Batgirl,” he replies, his tone matching hers.

“This going to make things awkward?” she asks.  She catches herself a little bit and tries to backtrack. “Well…I guess so.  Since you have to go play dead soon…right?”

“Don’t remind me.”

Barbara tries to stop her heart from sinking, but she nods. “Still a lot of questions and basically no answers.”

“Hey.” He moves her head so her lips are directly across from his. “Let’s not talk about that right now, ok? Let’s watch a scary movie instead.”

Barbara knows what he’s trying to do, the reference he’s trying to make, and she smiles as she shakes her head. “I can see through you, Grayson.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. That’s the truth. You’re the worst about scary movies.”

“Maybe I’ve improved.”

“Have you?”

“…Probably not.” He kisses her then, smooth and slow like he did earlier, and Barbara lets herself melt under it.  When he pulls back, he grins. “I’m going to get coffee.  Want some?”

“Please.”

She admires him as soon as the covers are off of him. His body is quite literally sculpted, and she grins in appreciation of the view while he rummages around on the floor trying to find his clothes.  Dick grabs his tactical pants from yesterday and starts to pull them on over his boxers when he pauses.

“Dick?” she asks, watching as he reaches into one of the pockets and pulls something out.

“Something in my pocket,” he mumbles.  He digs for a few seconds, and then he pulls out a small slender object that fits in his palm.  With careful hands, he holds it up. “This.  I remember it fell out of my guy’s hand yesterday after I knocked him out, and I grabbed it just in case it was something.”

Barbara sits up and leans forward. “What is it?”

“Tech. It looks like. I think that’s what it is.” He holds it out for her to see, the both of them fully aware that between the two of them, Barbara’s the tech genius.  Barbara tries to keep the covers over her as she reaches for the item, but she fails to stay completely covered in her interest to figure out more about this thing. She takes it from Dick’s hand and looks at it.

“There’s no way,” she murmurs.

“Babs?”

She squints her eyes and pulls it farther away from her face. “There’s no way this is what I think it is.”

“Babs?” Dick repeats.

“This…I’ve only _heard_ of these. Rumors more than anything, and, well, yeah, I've seen some tentative theoretical designs, but...but the designs match this just from eyeballing it. People say they exist, and no one really knows…but if it’s what I think it is, and it looks an awful lot like these theoretical designs I've seen floating around the Internet, this is a storage device with infinite space.  Anyone can store anything on here.  You could put an infinity of Internets on here, and you wouldn’t be anywhere close to getting full since, well, it’s infinity.”

“So what does that mean?” Dick crosses back towards the bed, and he sits on the edge.  It doesn’t escape Barbara’s notice that he’s not wearing a shirt, but she keeps that comment to herself.

“Someone knew,” she says thoughtfully. “Someone knew or at least suspected your target had this on him, and whoever knew about this also knew that no one would know how to work this piece better than I could.”

“Still humble as always, Babs.”

Barbara gives him a stern look, but she drops it to continue. “And if this guy you caught is in the same line of business per se as Spyral, there could be anything on here.  Intel about Spyral, the Justice League…hell, all of us really for all we know. The entire world could be all on this one little device.”

“Which will have all kinds of protection and firewalls and security codes wrapped around it,” Dick says.

“So that’s my next job,” Barbara finishes for him. “Does that sound too crazy? Am I filling in the empty spaces here too much?”

“I don’t think so. Truthfully, it sounds like the kind of thing Bruce would do.”

“But what if I’m wrong?” She looks over at Dick and away from the device. “What if I’m 100%, off the walls wrong?”

Dick tilts his head to the side and gives her a small smile. “When have you ever been wrong, Babs?”

Barbara’s smile in return is the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

* * *

“Spyral will be getting worried about you.”

“I know.”

“You’re going to have to do something.”

“I know.  I just don’t want to.”

“I don’t want you to, either.” Barbara looks out her window and sees the moon shining brightly.  Dick’s eyes reflect it, and every time she looks at him, she can’t help thinking that that look is perfect on him. “I just got you back.”

“But you’re not losing me, Babs. Ok?  Bruce wanted you to know I was alive.  This isn’t goodbye forever.” Dick sounds so sure of himself, and in all reality, Barbara knows he’s being rational.  Once she’s working on this new piece of tech, she’ll need to be in contact with him.  Bruce has this planned out for whatever reason, even if he hasn’t said a word about, and Barbara knows she’ll go along with it.  She always does.

“Right,” she says, but she’s not thoroughly convinced by her logical side now for once. “So that means you’ll be leaving in the morning?”

Dick’s quiet for some long moments, and then he speaks. “I should.”

“Yeah. You should.”

Dick kisses her and tugs at her shirt to get it off for the third time that night.  They might as well stay naked, but Barbara thinks Dick likes taking her clothes off. “I’m not losing you. Not again.  We’ve always been a damn good team, Batgirl. So not again.”

“Promise?” she whispers as he kisses the hollow of her throat, the moon shining so brightly it even makes his hair glow in the darkness.

“Promise.” He trails a line down her neck and over her collarbone. “I’ll get a secure line worked out.  I have one to Bruce, and then I’ll have one to you.  Spyral can’t know about it.”

“And you’ll be able to keep it a secret?”

“You insult me.”

“Just…don’t die.”

Dick stops kissing her body, and he comes back up to her face, seeing her serious expression.  God, she knows this face.  Even with all of the tiny changes she noticed earlier, she knows his face.  It crosses her mind that now she knows his entire body, and thanks to her eidetic memory, she’ll never forget it.  However, she’s pretty sure that even if she didn’t have an eidetic memory, she’d never be able to forget this sight in front of her.

“I won’t,” he says. “You, either.”

“I won’t.” Barbara reaches out and touches his face, her thumb brushing lightly over his sharp cheekbone.  His cheekbones had been sharp even when he was a kid, though she’d attributed it to his natural skinniness at the time. “You’re my best friend. You know that?”

“Yeah,” he quietly replies. “I do.”

* * *

Dick is gone when Barbara wakes up the next morning, but that’s how Barbara wants it.  Right before she’d fallen asleep, she’d made him promise he’d be gone so she wouldn’t have to say goodbye again. True as ever, Former Boy Wonder has kept his word.  Barbara’s alone, and her body’s sore, but she’s awake with the knowledge that Dick is still alive. He’s still alive, and he’s still her best friend, and he’s still Dick.  Out of everything she could have hoped for, Dick still being Dick was the best possible scenario.

Barbara rolls over and finds a piece of paper with three words scribbled on it. Three words that make her smile. Three words that make her grab her laptop and start to work right away.  She doesn’t know how she’s going to contact Dick or how he’s going to get to her, but she knows that with the both of them, they’ll be able to work together to find the answers.  As she logs onto her laptop and plugs in the device, she places Dick’s note beside her where she can see those three short words in his short, terse handwriting.

_I’ll come back._


	4. Part II: Uncovered

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally wasn't going to write a Part II to this, but I got a lot of requests for a Part II, so...here you go! I'll be posting updates every other week, so I hope that's ok for y'all. There will be three chapters to Part II and at least one or two chapters to Part III.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed Part I, and I hope that you guys like Part II!
> 
> Please let me know what y'all think!
> 
> Song recs:  
> "A Beginning Song" - The Decemberists  
> "A Girl, A Boy, and A Graveyard" - The Reluctant Graveyard

When Barbara hears Frankie’s knock at the door, she prepares herself for the bombardment of questions she knows is about to happen. She doesn’t blame her roommate for being curious, but Barbara isn’t sure how to feel about everything that’s just happened between her and Dick.  She’s not sure how to feel about it, let alone explain it to someone who doesn’t know their strange, extensive history together.  And despite the fact that Dick is gone, and Barbara’s doing what she’s so often criticized her friends for doing in “waiting around for him,” she isn’t unhappy—that much she knows to be true.  Out of all the emotions she could possibly feel, she doesn’t feel dissatisfaction with her situation.  However, she knows she’s not entirely happy, either. She at least knows that much to be true, too.

“Come in,” she calls out, putting on her mental armor to protect herself from Frankie’s torrent of bullet-sharp questions.  As she watches the doorknob turn, she slowly inhales, and then Frankie’s head appears from around the edge of the half-opened door to her room.

“Hey,” Frankie greets, her excitement practically radiating off her. “I saw he left.  That guy. Dick.”

“You did?” Barbara asks, and she’s genuinely a little bit surprised to think that Dick possibly said goodbye to Frankie before heading out.

Frankie nods and crosses towards her before sitting down on Barbara’s bed as if she’s never felt more at home anywhere else. “Mmhmm.  I got a nice view this morning of him swinging down past my window. Thought he was going to go splat against the sidewalk until I saw him make a perfect landing. And then I remembered that he _was_ Nightwing.”

Barbara knows she should smile, but she suddenly can’t bring herself to do it. After exchanging so many smiles with Dick last night, she can’t find any more right now. “Oh, yeah. That sounds like him.  He’s always been good at the…” She trails off and then mimes the motion of him jumping off a building with her hand.

“So what happened?  He’s supposed to be dead, right?  Nightwing was Dick Grayson, and Dick Grayson is supposed to be dead.  I mean, I saw it happen on my TV a year ago.  He was unmasked and killed for the entire world to see. And don’t tell me he _is_ dead because I know what a living person looks like, and that young man was most _definitely_ alive.” Frankie places her hands behind her on the mattress and leans on them, staring at Barbara with intensely curious eyes.  Barbara pauses as she thinks about how to explain Dick’s history to Frankie.  Barbara certainly trusts Frankie enough to tell her what’s going on with Dick and Spyral, but she doesn’t know how much even _she’s_ supposed to know.  What did Dick tell her that he was allowed to, and what did he tell her that had been purely a secret?  What ugly Spyral secret will come back to bite Frankie if she knows about it and all because Barbara shared it with her?

“Well…long story short…he faked his death, and then Batman asked him to go undercover with this shitty organization, so he did,” Barbara says bluntly. She might as well be as honest as she can. “And…yeah. I just found out he’s alive after I’ve thought he was dead for all this time.”

Frankie’s eyebrows go shooting up as she stares at Barbara in disbelief. “You didn’t know?  That he was alive?”

Barbara doesn’t know why she feels her cheeks color, why she feels herself starting to get defensive, but she shakes her head. “No…I…it’s a lot more complicated than that.  I didn’t know he was alive, and…and Batman covered his tracks enough to convince everyone that Dick really _was_ dead. So I just…accepted it.”

“And all this time, Nightwing’s been alive and well working as Double-oh-7 for this group of bad people?” Frankie asks.  Now that Barbara hears it out loud, it sounds ridiculous, Barbara realizes. It doesn’t sound so bad whenever Dick tries to explain it, and really, it doesn’t even sound _that_ bad when she puts it into verbal words. But for whatever reason, when Frankie summarizes what Dick’s been up to for the past year, it just sounds flat out unbelievable.

“Uh…yeah,” she says lamely. “He had a mission that brought him back to Burnside, and I got a text of an address from a phone registered to Batman, so when I went, there Dick was, and then…you kind of know what happens next.”

“Babes, you didn’t tell me you knew Dick Grayson.  Out of everyone you know, you didn’t tell me you knew _him_ ,” Frankie says, her voice somewhat awed. “Do you know just how famous that boy is in this city? Bruce Wayne’s ward?”

“Um, yeah.  I grew up with him more or less.” Barbara runs a hand through her hair and draws her knees into her chest. “Since my dad’s commissioner, he was close with Bruce Wayne, so he always got invited to those ritzy balls at Wayne Manor.  And when I was old enough, Bruce started inviting me, too, and that’s how I got to meet Dick Grayson.”

“Did you know he was a superhero?” Frankie asks.  She’s clearly loving listening to this, and even though Barbara’s having a tough time going through all these memories she’s so carefully put away in the back of her mind, there’s a part of her that enjoys pulling them out again, too.

“Kind of.  I…it’s a long story.” Barbara smiles and hopes Frankie will just accept that because honestly, she’s too tired to go into the details right now.  She can barely keep up with everything that’s happened, let alone talk about the complicated set up of her previous relationship with Dick back when they’d been kids.  Besides, she has no idea how she can do that without exposing Bruce’s identity as Batman, and even though he’s not Batman anymore, she can’t do that to him.  Even if it’s just to Frankie, and she trusts Frankie with her life. She just can’t do that to Bruce.

Frankie seems to pick up on Barbara’s hesitation because she just nods and accepts it. “So…will you at least tell me if Dick’s an ex?  And what’s going on with you two now?”

Finally, Barbara gives her friend a genuine smile, and she shrugs a little bit. “As for exes…not quite.  We’ve always been…very deeply attached to each other.  Best friends who had a mutual attraction, and we’ve never really been quiet about it.  But we were never an _official_ thing. I mean, yeah, we were…kind of…but not really.”

“That makes absolutely no sense,” Frankie say, making Barbara laugh. “But you and Dick Grayson…wow.”

“Yeah, well, it doesn’t get any easier since I’m not sure what’s going on with us now,” Barbara say, still laughing.  She sighs and looks down at her laptop.  She’s been working for hours, and she feels like she barely has anything to show for it. “I mean, we’re ok, and we’re serious in how we feel about each other, but he had to go back to Spyral.  I’m supposed to be here figuring this out.”

Frankie looks at the flash drive Barbara gestures to, and she squints her eyes. “And that is…”

“A flash drive that’s rumored to have endless storage.”

“Right. Of course.”

“And I’m supposed to be hacking into it, but it’s taking forever. Not that I expected anything different because if that _is_ what this thing is, then there’s no way it’d be so simple as just a few codes and a couple hours’ wait.  This is much more complicated than that, and it’s just a bit of a setback.”

“While I’m actually super into what’s going on with that flash drive, right now I just want to hear about _you_ , Babes. I want to hear if you’re ok.” Frankie leans forward and lightly pats Barbara’s knee. “Because you’re not looking it.”

Barbara wants to feel offended over being such an easy read, but she doesn’t have the energy to fight Frankie on this.  All she can do is feel how tired she is and nod. “Well…yeah.”

“So you’re basically confirming for me that you’re not ok.”

When Barbara stares into her friend’s eyes, Frankie’s statement repeating over and over in her head, she wonders if that’s what the truth is. If she really isn’t ok.

* * *

_Four years ago._

“You’ll really watch another scary movie with me?” Barbara’s face lights up as Dick starts to regret agreeing to watch the latest scary movie she’s discovered, but as soon as she smiles, Dick doesn’t regret it quite so much.

“Sure,” he says with a casual shrug. “We can watch it.  What harm is another scary movie?”

She gives him a suspicious look, not fully trusting his reasoning. “You hate them.”

“I do,” he admits. “But it’s not like I was planning on sleeping tonight, anyway.”

She drops her suspicious expression and smiles at him again as she crosses to his DVD player to plop the disc into place. “You say that every time we watch one.”

“Because it’s always true.  When was the last time I got any sleep, Babs?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t keep up with your schedule,” she lies.  She totally does.  She’s out on patrol most of the time with him, anyway, and they spend so much of their time when they’re not patrolling studying together.  Bruce likes it, and even though Jim Gordon would rather shoot himself in the foot than admit that he likes Barbara and Dick studying together, he likes it, too.

“Well, between the Robining and the homeworking, I don’t get much sleep in,” he says.  She pushes the DVD into the slot and walks back to the couch before plopping down on it. Dick smiles again, noticing what a little treat it is to see her all loose and relaxed, so different than how she presents herself in public.

“Neither do I,” she admits. “But that’s ok.  Maybe we can catch some z’s during this movie.”

“You really want to sleep through this one?  You’ve been going on about it for the past 10 minutes.”

“…ok, I don’t want to sleep through it, but I could also use some sleep.”

“Ready for it to start?”

“Hell yeah.  Are you?”

“I guess this is as good as it’s going to get.” Dick grabs the blanket from off the back of the couch and tosses it over him, but Barbara snatches the corner closest to her, and she pulls hard so it covers her more than it covers him. “Hey!”

She smiles wickedly at him and burrows down underneath the warm blanket. If Dick didn’t know any better, he’d think she was purposefully batting her eyes up at him. God, he has no idea how she can look so _happy_ about stealing a blanket from him while looking so innocent with those large green eyes. “Shhh. The movie’s starting.”

“Yeah, I’m aware of that.  Just like I’m aware of you stealing my blanket.”

“You have lots of blankets around this castle, rich boy. Find your own blanket.” She conveniently leaves a Dick Grayson-sized portion of the blanket free. The space is just big enough that it’ll cover him but only if he gets very, very close to her. She smiles, sweet and innocent at him, and she makes a big show of not giving the blanket back.

“Babs, you’re breaking my heart.”

“Get your own individual blanket, Boy Wonder.”

“Make me.”

“Shhh. I don’t want to miss the movie.”

“Dammit, Babs,” Dick says, but he doesn’t mean it.  How could he possibly be actually annoyed with her when she looks so cute.  She even has her long red hair pulled up into a high ponytail, and she’s just _cute_.  Dick notices that there’s enough space for him under the blanket if he scoots into her, so he waits a few seconds, and when Barbara’s absorbed in the opening lines of the movie, he ducks into the blanket and pulls it over him as he moves up close next to her.

Barbara hides her smile, but she desperately wants to grin with the weight of her victory.  Dick’s arm is touching hers beneath the blanket, and if she didn’t know him, she’d say his hand was awful close to hers, but she doesn’t want to jinx anything, so she stays quiet. After a couple silent seconds between them, the only sound in the room the opening credits of their movie, she looks over at him and lets a tiny smile cross over her face. “Scared yet?”

Dick looks back at her, and his grin could illuminate the entire room. “Not anymore.”

* * *

 “Where the hell have you been?”

Dick barely glances at Helena as he sweeps by her, his eyes straight ahead as he goes to place his ID and gun on her desk.

“I asked you a question, Agent 37.  Where the hell have you been?”

“I told you I had some things to take care of,” he replies, and he finally turns his gaze on her.  Helena is angry. She is very angry, and Dick doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist in order to clue in to just how furious she really is.

“No, you said you were going dark, and then you disabled all of our trackers on your equipment,” she bites back, her eyes flashing.

“Yeah. By the way, you didn’t tell me there was a tracker embedded in my escrima sticks.” Dick knows he’s pressing his luck with how flippant he’s being, but he can’t help himself. He’s too pissed, and his adrenaline’s pumping too hard for him to back off right now.  The words are coming, and he’ll be damned if he’s the one to stem them.

“ _And_ you disabled your Hypnos implants,” Helena continues, acting like Dick hasn’t spoken at all.

“Of course I did,” he replies with a snort. “You didn’t think I was actually going to leave anything turned on so you could track me, did you?”

“Agent 37, you’re one—“

“My name is Dick,” he interrupts.  His voice is sharp and harsh, and his abrasive tone conveys every negative thing he’s felt towards Spyral and anything to do with it over the past year. He isn’t holding back at all, and his intention is clear in how he snaps at Helena.  For a second, he thinks she’s going to hit him, but she sets her jaw and swallows a bit.

“Dick,” she says slowly, too precisely. “Your actions will not go without some kind of disciplinary reinforcements.”

“What are you going to do?  Fire me?” Dick retorts.  He doesn’t sound bitter so much as just annoyed now.  Helena’s dark eyes flash at him, and he pushes his luck even more by giving her a small smirk. “Yeah. There’s my gun and ID so you can monitor me or punish me or do whatever you need to this second.  If you need me, Matron, I’ll be in my bunk.  You know where to find it.”

He half-expects her to call him back or to shoot him through the shoulder with her crossbow as he leaves the room, but Helena does neither, which actually surprises Dick.  As he makes his way through the large plane to the bunk that’s usually his on long flights, he feels his pulse start to calm down, the adrenaline start to drain. He doesn’t feel energized so much as just exhausted.  He doesn’t feel angry anymore. Just tired.  After everything he’s been through in the past 48 hours, he doesn’t know how he’s still standing.  He’s been through worse physically, mentally, and probably even emotionally, but this reunion with Barbara is what’s done him in most of all.

It hits Dick that she knows he’s alive.  It hits him that they’ve reconnected, and she missed him. And right now, she’s probably waking up and noticing that he’s gone.  He tries not to think about that.  Not now. He can’t think about it now. Instead, he thinks about how he’ll have to set up another encrypted phone line once he’s back at St. Hadrian’s. Getting one established on the plane is too risky, and he isn’t ready to blow his cover when he still has so much work to do.  Now that he’s away from Helena, he hears his own words running through his head, and he actually physically cringes.  If he knows Helena—which he doesn’t, but he knows _enough_ about her—she won’t forget what he’s said to her.  She remembers, and she remembers well, and Dick would be fooling himself if he allowed himself to believe that she’d just let today slide under the radar.

And honestly, he’s not sure he wants her to overlook his outburst towards her. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t give a _fuck_ about what happens here at Spyral as long as he gets to keep his family safe.  Without a doubt, he knows Spyral won’t fire him.  They need him too much to do their dirty work, and whether he likes it or not, he needs to be there to make sure he keeps his family’s identities safe. Spyral may know who Batman is, but he’ll be damned if they find out the truth about Jason, Tim, and Barbara.

Dick leans back against the pillow in his bunk, and he stares up at the low ceiling.  Sometimes he can’t believe that this is his life now.  He can’t believe that he’s no longer Nightwing, no longer a part of his family. Glancing down at his phone, he thinks about how easy it would be just to punch in Tim’s number and give him a call. It’d be so easy, as easy as breathing. But he can’t, and he knows it, so he doesn’t entertain the thought for long.  Seems like he can’t entertain the thought of _anything_ nice for long these days.

Not anymore.

* * *

_Four years ago._

“Why’re you jumping?  It’s not like you didn’t solve everything within the first 45 minutes of the movie,” Barbara says, shooting Dick a look right after he jumps when the movie’s ghost antagonist leaps out in front of the nosy protagonist teenagers.

“Doesn’t mean I’m not still freaked out,” he defensively replies. “Hey, this stuff is scary.  You have the lighting and the music and just everything combined together, and it’s _scary_ , ok?”

“Ever think about how things in real life would be so much scarier if we had background music playing?” Barbara asks thoughtfully. Dick makes an unhappy sound, and he shakes his head, the movement a little frantic as he thinks about it.

“Our lives are scary enough.  I don’t want to think about how much more _awful_ they’d be if we had creepy ass violins playing in the background and drums pounding whenever one of the guys carrying guns jumps out at us.” Dick’s face turns down into an even unhappier expression while Barbara laughs. “I’m so glad you think this is hilarious, Babs.”

“I do,” she admits, still giggling a little bit. “It’s funny because you’re never afraid of anything, but you get so jumpy during scary movies.”

“That’s false. I get scared by plenty,” he argues.  He doesn’t expect Barbara to pause, but she goes a little still beside him, and then she looks up at him.

“You get scared?” she asks.

Now it’s his turn to give her a weird look. “Of course I do. Did you really think I don’t ever get freaked out by things?”

“Well, I don’t know! You’re really good at pulling off the whole I’m-Batman-and-never-feel-afraid vibe sometimes,” she argues with a little bit of a shrug. “I mean, yeah, no one’s completely fearless, but you and Bruce are pretty damn close to it.”

“False,” Dick monotones. “I feel fear a lot. And it’s usually caused by these movies.”

“Dick, be serious.”

“Don’t you want to pay attention to the movie so you don’t miss what’s happening?”

Barbara gives a quiet huff, and she pauses the movie before turning back and looking at him. “Now I won’t miss what’s happening.

“You’re a hellcat.”

“Thanks. Now what are you most afraid of?” 

Dick laughs loudly at that, and he gives her a look. “This is a really strange time and place to have this talk, Babs.”

“I’m terrified of snakes,” Barbara says as if Dick hasn’t spoken at all. He raises his eyebrows and looks at her, more surprised than anything.

“What? You’re scared of snakes? You’re Batgirl, and you’re scared of snakes?”

“Yeah. They’re creepy,” she says as if he’s insane for even questioning her. “What are you afraid of?”

“Babs…”

“Dick.”

He takes a deep breath and shakes his head. “Well, it’s not something as concrete as snakes.  It’s…I don’t know. I guess I just get afraid of the people I care about getting hurt.  I know, I know.  It’s pretty generic.”

“Doesn’t make it any less valid.  Just because 500 million people are eating spaghetti tonight, it doesn’t mean I’ll be any less excited to eat spaghetti,” she says with a shrug.

Dick makes a face. “I can’t believe that’s the metaphor you used.”

“Shut up!  I was making a point.”

“Well…yeah. You asked, and that’s what I’m afraid of.  That and these stupid movies you make me watch.”

“You love it,” she says as she lightly punches his arm, landing the blow nowhere near as strongly as she would if she were genuinely hitting someone. Now that she’s satisfied, she picks up the remote and presses play to get the movie going.  This little intermission has been random and strange, but Dick likes that about Barbara.  He likes that he can never tell what she’s going to do next, even though she likes to think she’s all about logic and equations and calculations.

And what she does next surprises him.  After a few seconds in silence, she leans her head against his shoulder and sighs a little bit. “Don’t worry about anything happening to me, ok? I won’t let anything happen.”

“Not while I’m around, anyway,” he replies, his voice light but meaningful.

Barbara smiles. “Good.”

* * *

Dick stays locked up in his bunk until another agent knocks to let him know that he’s being summoned.  A flash of irritation passes through his whole body, but he hauls himself up and out of his bunk.  Briefly, it crosses his mind not to go at all, but he doesn’t want to get _too_ much in trouble.  Even though Spyral needs him, he doesn’t want to go in guns blazing and cause so much trouble that they do something to retaliate, something that could possibly endanger his family’s identities.

He manages to trudge down the hall to the small office Helena locks herself up in whenever they’ve got a mission they need to fly to. As head of Spyral, she gets an actual office, and Dick has to report to her, which he hates, but he does it because he has to.  He makes his way to her office and goes in without knocking.  She’s seated at her desk, looking over some things and scribbling her signature at the bottom of certain papers.

“Agent 37,” she greets coolly. “I trust you’ve taken a nice nap now that you’ve had the time to?”

“Of course,” he replies, his tone already sarcastic and biting. He expects her to get pissed, but she just sits there and shows no reaction.

“Good. I was hoping we’d get a chance to talk about your mission now that you’ve returned and have had a moment to rest up,” she says.  She finishes signing one last paper and then looks up at him with an expression that could almost be pleasant. “Your bunk was untouched, I’m sure?”

“No one’s been sleeping in it, so I’m happy.”

“Good,” she repeats. “Now. I’d like to talk about what happened on your mission.”

“I got the target, and then I took care of some personal things,” Dick says, his air completely casual.  Again, Helena doesn’t show any reaction, but she points to the chair across from her desk as a way of inviting him to sit.  Dick feels better when he stands, but he takes the invitation, and he sits, anyway.

“So you said.” She watches him sit down, and she folds her arms. “You know I’m on your side, Dick.  You know that, right?”

“Sure doesn’t seem like it.  I’m being forced to work for you, and I don’t get much choice in the matter because of these.” He indicates his implants. “So…you know. I’m not inclined to think that someone who’s in complete control over what I do is on my side.”

“I’m not an enemy, but you’ve got it in your mind that since I’m not Batman, I’m against you,” Helena says.  Dick frowns, and he takes a quick assessment of himself to make sure that she isn’t using her own Hypnos against him. When he’s sure that he’s in control of his own thoughts and feelings, he just shakes his head.

“That’s a really messed up way of looking at it,” he answers. “And one that isn’t true, by the way.  I just needed to take care of some personal things, and I wasn’t even gone long enough for anyone to miss me.”

“Not the way Batgirl’s missing you right now,” Helena says, her voice and eyes still cool. “Or should I call her Barbara? Barbara Gordon?”

And just like that, Dick’s world comes caving in.

 

 

 


	5. Flight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutouts to tam, Autumn_Froste, jamiemadrox, Help me, sharperobjects, and Kiosi_684 (yes, I'm the same Thoughtful Constellations from FFN who wrote The Risk of Fearlessness! ^_^) for reviewing!
> 
> Also, I forgot to mention a few quick things of mild importance in my last Author's Note!
> 
> -I tweaked a few details in the original 3 chapters. (Barbara tells Dick about Bruce's memory...that's actually about it, now that I think about it) When I started developing these extra chapters, I had a couple things I needed to rework, so I did that. But yeah, basically all I did was just include Barbara telling Dick about Bruce's memory since that's lowkey important to these upcoming chapters, namely this one.
> 
> -Since N52/DCYou continuity is weird as hell, I don't really know the exact years that Dick and Barbara met and knew each other. Their history is pretty ambiguous so far, so I'm just kind of working around with some guesses. If anyone has better guesses than I do on when they met + when Barbara was in rehab, feel free to let me know, but this is just some basic guessing on when I think things happened for the flashback sequences. I'm also going off the fact that they're both 21/22, so there's that!
> 
> Song recommendations:  
> "Make You Better" - The Decemberists  
> "JFK" - Lana Del Rey
> 
> Please let me know what you think! I love hearing back from you guys =)
> 
> Enjoy! =)

As soon as Barbara gets time to herself, she goes to Wayne Manor. Dick told her that the only person who knows he’s alive is Bruce, but she doesn’t believe that Alfred doesn’t know. Alfred might have been kept out of the loop at first, but Barbara firmly believes he knows _now_.  After all, Dick’s been “dead” for a year—there’s no way Bruce was able to keep that a secret for this long from Alfred.  The thing about Bruce is that he’s capable of keeping a huge, long-term secret from everyone. Everyone but Alfred.

She’s ridiculously nervous as she walks up the steps to the monstrous building, even though she’s been here thousands of times.  In a way, she knows this house better than she knows her own house, and yet, she can’t get over how large and imposing it is. As she makes her way up the steps to the front door, Alfred appears on the other side of the door as he opens it.

“Miss Barbara, hello,” Alfred says happily, smiling at her as she approaches. He’s not surprised by her visit—that much Barbara can tell just by looking at him.  Even though he’d known she was there after she’d punched in the entrance code up at the gates, she can see that he doesn’t look at all surprised to see her there at Wayne Manor.

“Hi, Alfred. How are you?” she asks.  She keeps her voice cool and casual.  She doesn’t want to give anything away.  Not just yet.

“I am well, thank you.  How are you?” he asks, and he ushers her into the familiar foyer that she’s spent many Batfamily Nights running through as she, Dick, Tim, Jason, and Damian had tried tagging each other.

“I’m good.  How’s Bruce doing these days? Any developments with his memory?” she asks back, trying not to sound or look too hopeful by asking about Bruce.

Alfred barely wavers. “Unfortunately, not, Miss Barbara. He has shown no further developments since last week.”

She hadn’t expected any developments, but she _had_ expected that pang of disappointment in her chest to hear what she’d already suspected. “I didn’t think so, but I thought I’d ask, anyway.”

“I certainly don’t blame you.  Now to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?” Alfred asks, and Barbara loves him for being able to cut straight to the point like that.

Now Barbara just stares straight at him. “Dick.”

One word.  She doesn’t need to say anything else because she knows Alfred will understand what she means. Sure enough, just like she’d expected, Alfred goes silent, and his body goes still, so still that she almost wonders if he’s been literally frozen.  After everything she’s witnessed in her life, a person literally being frozen in place wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen. “I know the truth.”

“Master Bruce didn’t intend for you to find out this way,” Alfred says regretfully. He looks mildly embarrassed but not enough for Barbara to feel satisfied with the situation.

“Bruce didn’t intend for me to discover over half the things I’ve found out on my own,” she replies, her voice a little more bitter than she’d planned it to be. “Why weren’t the rest of us allowed to know?”

“Miss Barbara…” Alfred takes a moment, and then he motions for her to follow him as he starts down the hall.  Barbara goes with him, unsure of what’s happening but willing to go with him all the same. “After Master Bruce made the decision to ask Master Richard to undertake something as profoundly difficult as going undercover for Spyral, he knew Master Richard would resent him for it.  And I think he knew that you, Master Jason, Master Timothy, and eventually Master Damian, would resent him, too. He can take Master Richard’s resentment. He’s dealt with it for years the way a parent deals with a resentful teen, but I don’t think he could deal with it from all of you.  Especially after he’d just lost Master Damian.  I don’t think he could handle being alone, and he knew that telling you all would result in him being alone.”

Barbara’s quiet as she listens, and she tries to think about Bruce in the months following Damian’s death.  She remembers his anger, his grief…she remembers his pain.  She’d never seen him in such pain, and she’s not sure she ever will again.  Despite the fact that she wants to throttle Bruce Wayne, memory in tact or not, she somewhat understands what Alfred’s saying because he’s right.  If Bruce had come out and told her that he’d asked Dick to fake his death, whether it was forever or just long-term, even short-tem, she would have lashed out.

But is it worse than thinking he’s been dead for a year, she asks herself. Bruce hurt the rest of the family by protecting himself, and how many times has he done that recently? For someone who so firmly believes in saving everyone else, keeping the secrets about the Joker knowing their identities and then Dick’s death, he hasn’t done anything but hurt the people he’s wanted to keep safe.

“But now I know he’s alive,” she says. “And I’m angry. I’m so angry at him, and I know I can’t do anything about it because he’s not even himself these days.”

“How did you find out?” Alfred asks. “About Master Richard’s faked death?”

“You know how I know.” Barbara stops walking, and she turns to face him, crossing her arms over her chest. “The text message I got with the address. It was from you.”

* * *

_Three years ago._

 

“Dick, I don’t know.  I think maybe I should just sit this one out,” Barbara says, nervously glancing over her shoulder.

“I don’t think so.  You’re stronger than you know, Babs.” Dick finishes fastening the binding around her legs. “You can totally do this.”

“I don’t know.  I barely knew how to do trapeze before I was shot, and now…now I don’t think it’s a great idea. I can’t control my legs, and what if something happens?” she asks.  She hates how her voice rises with that little bit of panic, but she can’t help it. There are all these images passing through her mind, and she can’t stop them.

“Don’t think like that.  It’s a way of setting yourself up for failure.  But look—there’s a net down below.  It’ll catch you.”

Barbara gives him a look, her way of letting him know that she doesn’t really believe him.  Honestly, she’s terrified. She’s absolutely terrified at the thought of getting up on the trapeze bars.  It’s funny, she thinks to herself, because had Dick brought her here a year ago, she would’ve had a blast.  She would’ve challenged him to see who could do the most flips or transfers, even though the both of them would have known that Dick would easily win. But it was the challenge that mattered. The challenge and nothing else.

Now, however, Barbara doesn’t find much comfort in a challenge. She finds comfort in avoiding her Batgirl costume and the faces of the people she’s come to know during her short run as a vigilante.  Despite herself, a lump forms in her throat, and she swallows hard so that Dick doesn’t notice anything’s wrong with her.  She glances over at him and sees him looking at her so calmly, and she thinks she’d give anything to be able to have his calmness, his quiet confidence, in moments like these.

“What if the net doesn’t catch me?” she asks.

“Then I will,” he replies, as if she should already know the answer. “Come on. You know the basics of Trapezing 101.”

“First of all, ‘trapezing’ isn’t a word.  Second—“

“Babs.” Dick interrupts her, and he gives her a smile that’s so reassuring she almost convinces herself that just by looking at his smile, she’ll be able to walk again. “You’ve got this.  I’ve got you.”

Barbara swallows again and then looks at the bar as he brings it in towards the both of them.  She’s watched Dick enough times to know how to do it, and he’s shown her some things on the low bars Bruce keeps in the batcave, but they’re up so high now.  As Barbara looks down, she feels that lump come back into her throat.  They’re actually much higher than she realized, and for the first time in her entire life, Barbara feels afraid of falling.

“Ready?” Dick asks as he moves behind her, his hands on either side of hers on the bar.  Barbara takes in a slow breath, and she gives a short, barely imperceptible nod.  _This is it_ , she thinks. _This is it, Barbara Gordon._

“Yes.”

* * *

_No_ , Dick thinks. _No._

“What did you say?” Dick’s heart is pounding, and he can barely think of how to react.  Suddenly, he gives a snort and a half-eye roll. “Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? You think Barbara Gordon, the police commissioner’s daughter is Batgirl?”

Helena’s face doesn’t change as she calmly stares at Dick. “I don’t think. I know. I have evidence.”

Dick’s world is crumbling beneath his feet, but he doesn’t let his expression show any signs of worry.  If anything, he lets himself look annoyed.  He can’t give in and confirm that Barbara’s Batgirl until Helena gives him solid proof that she knows—just from what he knows about Helena, which admittedly isn’t much, she could be faking him out to trap him into admitting Barbara’s identity. So if Helena wants to play games, Dick decides that he can play games, too. “If you have evidence, then it’s wrong because Barbara isn’t Batgirl.  Don’t you think I’d be able to tell if my own friend were playing at being someone I worked closely with during my stint as Nightwing?”

Still just as calm as ever, Helena pulls out a file from near the bottom of her small stack of manila envelopes on her desk, and she opens it. “Gordon, Barbara Joan.  Born September 23, aged 21 years old, nickname Babs.  Daughter of Barbara Eileen Gordon and Jim Gordon, sister of James Gordon, Jr. Let’s see…” She pauses as she reads a little farther down, and Dick feels his heart start to pick up even more. “Top of her class…studied a variety of martial arts and dance for years, note the special focus on ballet. She planned on applying to the Police Academy, but Commissioner Gordon shut that notion down quickly and threw out her application when he found it.  Barbara was a friend of Dick Grayson, later revealed to be Nightwing, formerly known as Robin.  Around the time Barbara Gordon would have been 18, Batgirl appeared.  A small, red-haired female with the same build as Barbara Gordon, and she was frequently seen with Robin and Batman.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Dick scoffs.  He doesn’t want to hear any more of what Helena has to say, but he can tell by the way she lifts her eyes from the file that she’s going to keep going.

“I’m not done, Agent 37,” she replies. “Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon were seen together frequently throughout their high school years, and they were known to be quite close.  Interestingly enough, Batgirl went on a little hiatus during the years that Barbara Gordon was paralyzed after the Joker shot her.  And then when Barbara could walk again, Batgirl made a sudden reappearance with a brand new costume and even better gear than before.”

“That’s a coincidence,” Dick says, still sounding more annoyed than anything. He’s furious, and he feels panic bubbling deep down in his chest, but he can’t give that away. He can’t let Helena win because she’s still just giving him circumstantial evidence—he’s debunked cases where the circumstances were just as seemingly condemning as they are here. He can easily debunk this one, too.

“Body language analysts have commented on Batgirl’s balletic movements and have suggested she’s been trained not only in numerous styles of martial arts but in dance, too.  Emphasis in ballet.” Helena glances back up at Dick.

“All circumstantial,” he answers and shakes his head as if he can’t believe how stupid this is to him.

“DNA match.” As Helena gives him that last piece of information, she turns the file around for Dick to see, and he catches a match between Batgirl’s blood and Barbara’s blood.

_No._ _No._

“How did you get this?” he demands. “How do you know it’s legit?”

“Spyral’s been trying to figure out your friends’ identities for a long time, Dick. The rest of Gotham might be able to let strong circumstantial evidence pass by them, but we don’t. And it seems that when one of our undercover agents at the GCPD snatched a bloody scrap of fabric from Batgirl’s costume from the evidence room, we were able to put an ID on Batgirl,” Helena replies as she pushes the file for Dick to see more clearly. He opens his mouth to protest, but she cuts him off. “And remember—I’ve suspected this for a while. I pulled Barbara’s DNA before I received Batgirl’s. Got around the false identity Batman set up for her. Laurie Allison, was it?  Well, I compared Laurie’s sample to Barbara’s and…perfect match.”

It hits Dick then that he can’t keep up the pretense of fighting. He can’t keep telling Helena she’s wrong when she has scientific proof right there in front of her, and yet he can’t bring himself to confirm Barbara’s identity, so he just stares at the file. Finally, when he looks up at Helena, he forces the question off the tip of his tongue. One question. “How long?”

“Shortly after you started working for us, Spyral started digging. And when we had that run in with Batgirl a few weeks ago, I started pushing for more answers. The timing was perfect since I received official confirmation while you were performing your little disappearing act to go see her in Burnside,” Helena says, and she takes the file back from him. “You don’t think this whole thing was a coincidence, do you? This mission?”

“You sent me there on purpose,” Dick says.  He feels fury in his chest, and it’s tight and hot, and he wants nothing more than to grab his escrima sticks and use them to wipe that calm expression off Helena’s face. “You _wanted_ me to see Barbara.  You wanted to me to trap myself.  To trap her.”

“I had my suspicions that Barbara was Batgirl, and I know that there aren’t many other people in the world who know their way around computers the way she does.  If anyone could figure out the deal with this flash drive, it would be her.  I was knocking two birds out with one stone, Dick. I got confirmation that Barbara Gordon is, indeed, Batgirl, and I’m sure you left the flash drive with her so that she could do her computer genius thing on it and solve it while you were away.”

Dick’s mouth goes dry, and he honestly feels like he’s going to throw up. “This was a set up.  You _set me up_ , Helena.”

“Listen to me.” Helena stands up then, lightning quick, and Dick is reminded of just how physically capable she is.  It’s been a while since he’s worked a mission with her, but just that one simple movement of standing up reminds him of all the times they’ve worked together as a pair over the past year.  She was his partner.  She was his _partner,_ and she set him up. His jaw clenches, and he stares back at her. “I’m trying to help you, Dick.  I’m not threatening you or trying to expose your girlfriend. I’m trying to _help_.”

“How?” he snaps back. “Hmm?  Because it sounds like you went through an awful lot of trouble to prove who Batgirl is, and now you have all the evidence.  You set me up to expose her, and you’re turning around and telling me you’re trying to help me?  That’s bullshit.”

“I want to work out a deal with you,” she says slowly, and that sick feeling in Dick’s stomach intensifies.  Slowly, he shakes his head, and he takes a step back.

“No. I’m not making a deal with the damn devil,” he spits.

Frustrated, she sighs and leans forward over her desk. “I’m _not_ your enemy.  If you’ll let me, I want to help you.  I just want the flash drive…I want to know what’s on it, and I’ll erase the evidence about Barbara’s identity.  I can reroute my Spyral agents to leave the rest of your Batfamily alone. For now.  Because believe me, I have my suspicions about Red Hood and Red Robin, but if you work with me, I can get Spyral on a different route. Give your family time.”

“For what?” Dick snaps, moving back towards her with fury burning in his body. “You’re telling me you’re giving them _time_ —not giving up this witch hunt for good.  I’m not going to be satisfied with just a few months’ time, Helena. Not even a year’s worth of time. You’re going to get the evidence on them at some point, and then it’ll be over for them.  I’m not bargaining with that.  Not on them.  That price is too damn high.”

“It’s not high enough,” Helena snaps back, her eyes flashing now. “Dick. Let me help you.  Please. Let me _help_.”

Dick stares at her, and he thinks about his options.  Either he says no, and Helena continues to hunt Jason and Tim now with just as much fervor, or he agrees, and Helena will allow a little bit of time for them to go untouched but will eventually get them. No matter what, Spyral will go after them, and he’s not sure he can live with that.  But if he has time, then he can work something out maybe. He can get in contact with Barbara, and he can possibly get her to help him get Spyral off all of their backs forever.  It’s a slim chance, but a chance is all he wants.

“A year,” he says slowly. “I give you the flash drive, and you leave them alone for a year.”

Helena’s eyes narrow, and she shakes her head. “Not happening. Too long.”

“Then no.  You won’t get your hands on that flash drive.” He glares back at her, his eyes all heated challenge. Helena’s lips form a single line as she presses them together, and for a second, Dick thinks she’s going to launch herself at him in a full-fledged attack.

But she doesn’t.  She doesn’t attack him at all.  Instead, she inhales, and then exhales, and she nods. “Ok.”

Dick doesn’t trust how simple this is, how easy it was to get her to agree to his terms, but he doesn’t argue with her on it.  He just nods. “Ok.”

“What do we need to do?” Helena asks.  Her jaw’s clenched like his, and her eyes are still flashing, but Dick ignores it all.

Now he smiles. “We call Barbara.”

* * *

_Three years ago._

 

As Dick pushes the both of them off the high platform, Barbara’s heart stops beating.  She’s convinced that they’re going to fall, that something’s going to go horribly wrong, and she’s going to go plummeting down towards the net beneath her.  However, the feeling is only short-lived as she feels that familiar sensation, a sensation she never thought she’d feel again. Right before gravity kicks in, her heart tumbles, and her stomach drops, and she feels free. For the first time since she was shot, she feels truly and utterly free.  She feels like Batgirl.

And then gravity hits, and she and Dick go swinging down and back up again. She’s not aware of the quiet gasps she makes as they swing back up towards the ceiling, nor does she feel Dick’s body moving behind her and beside her as he swings them both like the acrobat he is. All she feels is this overwhelming sense of flying again, this sense of a smile on her face as she swings through the air. Words bubble up in her throat, but she can’t speak because she’s too elated.  After she’d received the news that she’d been shot, she didn’t think she’d ever be able to experience something like this again, and yet here she is. She’s flying.

“You ok, Babs?” Dick asks, raising his voice a little over the sound of the air rushing by their ears.

“Yeah…yeah, I’m ok.” She looks over her shoulder at him and smiles so beautifully he’s sure she can feel his heart skip against her back.

“Hold on—I’m letting go,” he says, and then he lets go, dropping down to the net with a neat series of somersaults that look effortless. Just like that, Barbara’s alone on the trapeze, and she no longer has the safe feeling of Dick controlling their swing behind her.  Panicking a little, she looks over her shoulder at him and sees him swinging solo.

“Dick—Dick, what—“ She starts, but she can’t finish because the words are too caught in her throat.  She can’t remember the last time she was afraid of heights, but now she can’t speak. Frantically, she starts looking down to find Dick.

“Don’t look down! I’m coming up!” he calls to her.

“What are you doing?” she demands, and she can’t believe she sounds so panicked.

“Helping you with rehab,” he says as he scrambles up the ladder opposite of Barbara.  He barely pauses when he looks over his shoulder at her when he’s about halfway up, and he gives her a little scowl. “Keep moving your body like I was doing.  Use your stomach muscles.  Now _those_ I know you can use.”

Barbara thinks about letting him know what she really thinks about him in that moment, but she’s never liked backing away from any challenge he’s thrown at her. Instead, she likes taking it head on and proving that she’s just as good as he thought she’d be—hell, she likes to be _better_.  As Dick keeps working his way up the ladder, she uses her stomach muscles to get her body moving in that same way Dick had been moving his to get some momentum up on the trapeze.  The swing starts to build up, and finally, she doesn’t have to work as hard to get more movement once physics kicks in.

“What are you doing?” she calls to him when she sees him swing on the bar opposite of her.  And she can’t see his face—not really—but she catches the white of his smile, the quick blue of his eyes as he swings.

“I’m catching you.”

* * *

Alfred gives Barbara the smallest smile. “I knew you’d figure it out.”

“Why?” she asks, pressing in on him.  She doesn’t know what to think, how to think.  All she knows is that Alfred has just confirmed her suspicions. After talking with Frankie, she’d started asking the same questions she’d had with Dick: who sent the text message? Why did it come from a number registered to Bruce?  Who knew Dick’s plans?  And the answer, the _only_ answer, was Alfred.

Alfred glances behind him, almost like he’s looking for Bruce, but then he stops and looks back at Barbara. “The information on the flash drive, if the rumors Julia has heard are correct, could have the Justice League’s identities on it. No one really knows where the flash drive came from or if it’s true that it has infinite storage, let alone the truth about the Justice League, but the rumors exist, and if they’re true....”

“So you needed my help?  To shut this down?” she asks with a frown.  Alfred nods, silently.

“Yes,” he replies. “I needed your help.  As soon as I heard Master Richard’s voice over Master Bruce’s private encrypted line to him, I knew that I needed to step in.”

“But why didn’t you just _ask_ me for help?” Barbara presses.  She doesn’t mean to sound so hurt, so angry, but she can’t hide the emotions in her voice now. At her tone, Alfred’s gaze turns remorseful, and he looks away for only half a second before his eyes come back to her face, his expression as calm as ever.

“You wouldn’t have believed that Master Richard was alive,” he replies. His voice is steadier than Barbara’s churning heart, and even through her anger and her hurt, she finds comfort in how steady he’s always been. “I wouldn’t have been able to get through to you. This was something you needed to discover for yourself, even if I did have a hand in making it happen.”

“By sending me the text message,” she says softly.

“Yes, Miss Barbara.”

She swallows and looks away from him, not wanting to show just how upset she is.  She doesn’t know what exactly she’s upset about or why, but she knows she feels hurt and disappointed. Whether her feelings are directed towards Alfred, Bruce, or even Dick, she doesn’t know.  She just knows that she feels them rising in her chest, and she feels like she’s going to scream.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” she says, her voice short and her tone clipped.

“Miss Barbara, I apologize for not being straightforward with you. I was simply trying to make the transition as painless as possible for you while still trying to acquire your assistance in the matter,” Alfred says, and Barbara believes him. She does.  It’s not like she thinks he’s lying to her or trying to emotionally manipulate her because out of everyone who would do that, especially to her, Alfred is the last one.

“I know,” she replies. “I’m just feeling pretty confused about all of this. I’ve thought Dick was dead for all this time, and it turns out he’s not, and you and Bruce knew. And I get why you guys did it. I do.  So I’m not as angry as I am disappointed but…” Her voice trails off, and she just shakes her head quietly as she pauses, trying to organize her thoughts. “I only came over to confirm that it was you, and I needed to grab a few things so I can keep working on the flash drive.”

Alfred’s face changes a little bit, just a subtle, almost imperceptible change, but Barbara notices it.  He looks disappointed and maybe even a little hurt himself, but instead of commenting on it, he just nods and steps to the side for her to pass by him. “Of course, Miss Barbara.  Take your time. Whatever you need.”

“Thanks, Alfred.” She starts to walk by him when he speaks again.

“Is Master Richard well?”

She pauses and looks back at him, tilting her head to the side a bit. “He…yeah.  He’s well. He’s alive, and he’s unharmed. I think that’s the best we could hope for right now.”

“Is he happy with Spyral?”

Finally, Barbara gives a tiny smile. A tiny, sad smile. “I think you know the answer to that.”

Alfred doesn’t smile back, but he nods just once. “That was all I wanted to know.”

Barbara nods back at him and starts off to Dick’s wing in the Manor. If she knows Alfred and Bruce as well as she thinks she does, she knows that Dick’s things will still be in place and untouched.  In the year after his “death,” she’s come to the Manor plenty of times, whether she was there on Batgirl business or as Barbara Gordon, but she hasn’t been to his part of the large house.

As she walks down the familiar halls, she tries not to feel like she’s invading Dick’s space.  He doesn’t live here anymore, nor is he going to walk in on her going through his things. And really, she’s not going through his things with the intention of trying to find things to use against him, but now that she’s actually following through with her idea, she can’t seem to recognize why exactly she _is_ here.

“What are you doing, Babs?” she whispers to herself. “What the hell are you doing?”

* * *

_Three years ago._

 

“What?” Barbara has that panic back in her voice again, and Dick suddenly flips upside down on the trapeze bar across from her.

“I’m going to catch you.  Come on. You know how to do this,” he encourages.

“No, I don’t!”

“A simple pass, Babs.  That’s it.”

“I’ve done it when I’ve been able to walk and when we were working together on patrol!  Not like…like this.” She can’t bring herself to say paralyzed.  She looks at him, but she barely sees his face through her panicky haze. He’s swinging now, holding his hands out towards her, but she can’t let go.

“You can do it!  Remember—I’ve got you,” he promises.  She hates him for how confident he is, how he’s so easy and smooth about something that’s such a big deal to her.  If she survives this, she’s going to throttle him.

“Dick—“

“Come on,” he says, cutting her off. “You’ve got this.”

Barbara keeps swinging, and so does he, and even though fear’s squeezing her heart so tightly she can barely breathe, she tells herself she can do this. She’s got to believe that Dick’s right—she’s got to have that same kind of faith in herself.  Finally, she swings herself enough, and Dick reaches out for her.

“Now!”

Barbara releases her hold on the bars, and she flies over towards Dick. She’s flying…flying…weightless and unattached.  There isn’t a batline for her to grab or a bar holding her up. She’s soaring through the air. As she reaches for Dick’s hands, she can only imagine how her face looks: a mixture of euphoric joy and pure terror. But she doesn’t think about that. All she thinks about is how it feels to fly and reach out for Dick.

Suddenly, she feels herself start to lose control, and she almost falters, almost puts her hands down, but then Dick’s hands are grasping hers. She looks up at his face and sees him beaming down at her as he hoots and hollers.

“You did it!  Look at you!” he shouts. He’s so proud. “You did it!”

“You caught me,” she shouts back to him, and he nods.

“I told you I would.  But _you_.  You did it!”

She laughs, her voice shaky and a little bit breathy now, and she doesn’t dare look away from him. 

“I did,” she whispers. “I did it.”

* * *

Dick always used to make fun of her when she talked to herself. It’s not something she does regularly, more of a habit whenever she’s thinking, but Dick still used to love giving her shit over it.  Dick. God, these halls have so much history in them, she thinks as she looks along the walls around her. They’ve seen Bruce grow up. They watched Dick become Robin. They sheltered Tim and Jason as they grew and changed, and from time to time, they even witnessed her growth, too.

The Wayne Manor has so many memories all throughout it, and Barbara knows that that single fact is why she’s avoided coming to Dick’s part of the house. She doesn’t want to remember all the nights she and Dick did homework together, how she’d sprawled across his giant bed.  He’d take the couch at first, but after a couple hours, he’d find an excuse to get on the bed with her. She’s avoided these memories for a long time, but now that she knows Dick is alive, she wonders if having them all come back like this will be as painful as it had been before.

When she reaches Dick’s door, she doesn’t pause or let any hesitation creep into her bones.  When she reaches Dick’s door, she places her hand on the knob and turns.  She doesn’t expect anyone to be in his room when she enters, but she goes still when she sees nothing but quiet stillness inside, and she feels a little disappointed.  Quietly, she walks into his room and turns the lights on.  Just like she’d suspected, nothing has been touched.  All of Dick’s things from when he’d lived there during his time as Robin, his time as Bruce Wayne’s son, are still in place.

Barbara doesn’t actually need anything from Dick’s room in order to work on the flash drive.  That part had been a lie when she’d told Alfred she needed to pick up some things from the Manor. In all reality, she doesn’t need anything at all.  She just wants to see Dick’s room again—she wants to see something familiar, something that makes her feel like there’s something still left about Dick that she knows.

She’s silent as she crosses over to his large bulletin board. Now that Barbara thinks about it, she doesn’t remember a single time when it hadn’t been covered in pictures, upcoming events, due dates, anything and everything that was important to him. She looks over the board, noticing severely outdated posters for concerts and movie releases scrawled on pieces of paper.  Silently, she smiles as she glances over the things he’d last pinned to the board, but then she sees something that catches her eye.  She sees a picture from the first Christmas party she and Dick had attended. They’re both wearing ugly Christmas sweaters, and Dick’s matches his blue eyes.

“No way,” she murmurs out loud, unpinning the picture and taking it in her hands.  She remembers the night perfectly—they’d flirted the whole time.  Nothing too serious but with just enough of a genuine hint of something extra lying underneath their words and actions that she’d willingly let him give her a quick peck under the mistletoe.  “No way, Grayson.”

They both have one arm wrapped around each other’s waists, and Barbara has a hand on his chest as they both beam directly at the camera. God, they were young, she realizes. They were so damn young. At the time the picture had been taken—by Alfred, of course—Dick had been Robin, and she’d still been wearing grey and blue as her Batgirl colors.  But they’d happy, and she can clearly see that in her younger face. 

Quickly, she glances down at her phone to check the time, and she decides it’s time to go.  She’s been here long enough, and the last thing she wants to do is get caught by Alfred. Reaching halfway up to pin the picture back to the board, she pauses.  She freezes, staring down at her and Dick’s smiling faces, and then she tucks the picture into her inside coat pocket where it won’t bend. As she turns off the lights in his room, she can practically hear Dick’s voice calling out to her, “Try not to miss me too hard until the next time you see me, Babs.

“Yeah,” she says quietly to herself, closing the door behind her. “I always do.”


	6. Acquiescence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutouts to Rcmanov and tam for reviewing!
> 
> Just as a heads up, there's a pretty explicit sex scene towards the end, so if that kind of thing gets you excited ;) but if you want to skip, you can =)
> 
> Song recommendations:
> 
> "The Kids Aren't Alright" - Fall Out Boy  
> "Samson" - Regina Spektor
> 
> As always, please let me know what you think! Kudos/comments are VERY appreciated! Enjoy! =)

It’s several days, but Dick finally picks up his phone to call Barbara. He’s in Helena’s office, feeling her gaze on his face as he dials Barbara’s number.  He hates that Helena will be here for this phone call, but he can’t tell her no.  If he’s going to work with Barbara and keep her safe, keep his family safe, he has to let Helena be involved with his calls.  He’s quiet as he leans back into his chair.  He’d much rather be up and pacing about, but he needs to appear calm, so he stays quiet while struggling to sit still as the phone rings.

Barbara answers in the middle of the third ring. “Hello?”

“Babs?” His relief at hearing her is instantaneous, and he can’t stop the tiny, tiny smile that passes over his face. “It’s me.”

“Dick.” There’s relief in her voice, too.  Even though it’s only been five days since he’s been out of Gotham, it’s so nice to hear her voice again. “Are you safe at Spyral again?”

“Yeah, I am…but hey.” He needs to tell her before she gets too in depth into anything.  He hopes she’ll understand, hopes she won’t get angry and hang up on him, but he needs to tell her. “There’s been a development that I need to talk to you about.”

Barbara pauses for a few seconds, and Dick can practically see the gears in her head turning. “Development?  What’s going on?”

“Spyral knows who you are,” Dick says.  He needs to get this out first before he says anything else. On the other end, Barbara’s deathly quiet.

“They know?” she repeats, her voice unreadable.

“They know.  They know about everything. The flash drive…your identity…everything.  My boss is monitoring the call this second.  Say hi, Helena.” Dick glances over at Helena, who smiles back at him.

“Hi, Barbara,” Helena says into the headset she’s used to tap into their conversation.  Barbara doesn’t answer.  She’s quiet. So quiet that Dick wants to take off to go find her right then.

“Helena promises she’ll leave the family alone for a year if we help her with the contents of the flash drive.  She already has suspicions about Red Robin and Red Hood, but she promised she’d hold off on pursuing any leads for a year,” Dick says slowly. He hopes he’s conveying everything he needs to her, but she’s being so quiet.  When he stops speaking, there’s no sound on the other end of the line. “Babs? Are you still here?”

“I’m here,” she says, and she sounds much calmer than he’s been expecting. “I’m just considering everything.”

“I wish I could tell you you could take your time, Miss Gordon, but I’m afraid we’re in a bit of a time crunch,” Helena interjects, meriting an angry glance from Dick. “I’m sorry to rush you like this, but I need to know if we have your cooperation.”

“You want me to cooperate with your creepy ass spy organization in exchange for my family getting only one year off from having to worry about one less group of people trying to uncover our identities?” Barbara asks. Dick tries to figure out if she sounds mad, scared, upset…anything.  But he gets nothing.  He can’t detect anything as to how she’s feeling.

“Yes,” Helena replies, and Dick all but holds his breath as he waits for Barbara’s answer. “A year is a long time.  That’s a lot of people to save. Besides, Spyral isn’t out to stop you or make you give up the cowl.  We just like information.  We like keeping an updated record.”

“That you can whip out whenever you want and use against us,” Barbara counters. Now she sounds angry, and Dick doesn’t know if he feels proud of her or desperate for her to agree. Anything for her to stay safe.

“We might need your cooperation from time to time,” Helena says, her tone mild now.

“Or you’ll leak our identities all over the Internet. Yeah.  That sounds like a really great deal.” Barbara doesn’t bother to hide the sarcasm in her voice. “You’re crazy if you think I’ll agree to something like that.”

“It’s either that, or we start going after Red Robin and Red Hood,” Helena counters back. “And I have a damn good idea who those boys are.”

Dick feels his stomach turn a little at the threat, but he doesn’t speak up. Not yet.  Barbara’s quiet again, and he listens, trying to hear anything that will give him another indication as to how she’s feeling. After a few seconds, she sighs, short and frustrated. “I’ll work with you.”

Helena smiles. “I thought so.”

“I’m not going to screw you over, either.  But just know that once I’m done with you this time around, I’m not going to stop looking for ways to keep you and your nasty group of spies away from the people I care about.” Barbara’s voice is quiet and only slighted heated, but it sends chills down Dick’s spine in a way that makes him remember how awful it is for people who on her bad side.

“All I ask is for your complete cooperation now, Barbara,” Helena smoothly replies.

“But I don’t want to report to you,” Barbara adds now. “I want to report to Dick.  I know you’ll have to monitor the calls or whatever, but I’m reporting to Dick.”

Helena glances over at Dick, silently asking him if that’s ok, and he nods. “Alright.  You can report to Agent 37 for updates in the future.”

“I’d like to speak with him now.  Privately.”

At that, Helena’s eyebrows go up, and she gives Dick a look that makes him grit his teeth.  Quickly, he takes his phone off the desk and stalks out and away from her office all the way back to his bunk. He locks himself inside and makes sure the soundproof feature is working before he speaks again. “Babs.”

“Are you by yourself?”

“Yes. The call’s being monitored, but Matron isn’t here anymore,” he replies.  He feels weird calling Helena by her name when talking to Barbara, so he uses her codename.

“What the hell’s going on?” Barbara asks. “She found out?”

“Very good deductive reasoning.  Was able to confirm it by having undercover Spyral agents swipe a sample of Batgirl’s blood from the GCPD evidence room and compare it to a sample of yours, so that’s why the fake identity Bruce set up for you didn’t work. Matron received confirmation while I was in Burnside tracking down the flash drive.  Turns out this whole thing was on purpose. She knew there’d be a chance I’d run into you, and she risked everything on taking that chance,” he explains. Barbara goes silent, and again, Dick wonders if she’s hung up, but then she swears.

“Dammit!” He hears something slam in the background. “Dammit!”

“Babs…” He thinks of something to say, anything to comfort her, but he can feel her anger and frustration radiating through the phone. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.  I had no idea any of this would happen…I didn’t know Spyral would be able to latch onto your identity like this.”

“Everything has always been circumstantial.  Nothing anyone could ever pinpoint and prove for sure, but now…that’s all pointless.” Barbara doesn’t sound angry so much right now as frustrated. “Everything’s been for nothing.”

“Babs, don’t say that. I’ll fix this,” he promises. “I’ll fix it.”

“Is there something _to_ fix?” she asks, a demand. “Because Dick…there’s no coming back from this.”

“I promise,” he says, and his mind starts to work.

* * *

 

_Five years ago_.

 

Barbara doesn’t like going to Bruce Wayne’s big parties. They’re long and boring, and she finds herself tuning everyone and everything out instead of learning more about Gotham.  Her dad takes her because he wants her to learn something, but other than a somewhat interesting group of people to watch, she really doesn’t get much out of these events at all. The only part she likes is getting to dance, but even then, she doesn’t like it _that_ much because most of the boys who ask her to dance are gross.

She’s standing by her father when she hears Bruce Wayne’s familiar, “Jim! I thought that was you!”

Jim looks over his shoulder, and she looks with him to see Bruce Wayne coming towards them.  Barbara doesn’t hate Bruce’s parties because she hates Bruce himself. Actually, she thinks Bruce is handsome for an older guy, and he’s always been nice to her and her dad, so she likes him fine.  She just hates these damn parties.  As Jim lifts his hand to shake Bruce’s, Barbara notices a younger boy about her age following along behind Bruce.  He’s skinny with light blue eyes and black hair that’s a bit too long for him.  Right away, she knows she hates his floppy haircut.

“Bruce! Good to see you,” Jim says, shaking Bruce’s hand.

“Barbara, you look so grown,” Bruce says warmly when he turns his attention to her.

“You, too, Mr. Wayne,” she replies, polite as can be.  When Bruce takes his hand back, he turns towards the boy at his side.

“Jim, Barbara, this is my ward, Dick Grayson.  Dick, this is Commissioner Gordon and his daughter Barbara,” he introduces.  Dick steps forward and shakes Jim’s hand in that same professional but warm way Bruce had before.

“Nice meeting you, sir,” he says.

“Actually, Barbara, I believe that you and Dick are the same age,” Bruce says. Barbara knows he doesn’t mean anything by it.  Not like _that_ , anyway, but she still hates the attention drawn to the fact that both she and this new guy are the same age.

“Oh,” she says vaguely, still polite as she notices that Dick hasn’t quite pulled his eyes off of her just yet. “What school do you go to?”

“I’ll be going to Bruce’s alma mater,” Dick replies. “Where do you go?”

“Nowhere that fancy,” she says bluntly, meriting a stern look from Jim. She feels mildly chastened, but she doesn’t back down or take back her statement.  If anything, Dick smiles brighter at that.

“Want a drink?” he asks.

“No, thank you.”

“You sure?  We have some great non-alcoholic beverages.”

“Go get a drink, Babs,” Jim prompts her.  He gives her a little push and ignores the furious look on his daughter’s face as she can’t find it in herself to be overly rude to Bruce Wayne’s new ward. “No alcohol now.”

“Dad, I’m 16,” she mutters, but she doesn’t say it too loudly as she walks off with Dick.  Out of the corner of her eye, she sneaks a look up at him.  He’s taller than her and walks with an easy, graceful confidence she isn’t used to seeing in other teenage boys.  Even though she’d rather die than admit it, he’s pretty handsome, and he looks at home here in Wayne Manor.  She can’t remember how long Bruce has had a ward off the top of her head, but she knows he’s still pretty new.

“Your dad doesn’t have to worry,” Dick says with a casual air, far too casual and at ease for a normal 16 year old boy. “I won’t sneak any alcoholic drinks to you.”

“Good job on following the law,” she answers perhaps a little too drily because he turns and glances at her with a curious face.

“Thanks,” he replies.

Barbara makes a little face. “Are you thanking me because I complimented you on doing what you should do in the first place?”

“Yeah.”

She waits for an explanation, but he doesn’t give her one. She opens her mouth to ask, but they arrive at one of the many bars spread throughout the enormous room. It takes the bartender only a few seconds to look at Dick before he pulls out two drinks that Barbara can tell right off the bat aren’t alcoholic.  As Dick Grayson hands her her drink, she looks up at him and takes it.

“Thanks.”

He smiles, and his smile is lovely. “You’re welcome.”

The second Barbara’s heart flutters, she knows she’s going to hate the rest of the evening even more than she usually does.

* * *

 

“Ah!”

Barbara falls to the ground with a loud cry as the pain across the back of her skull sets in.  She’s been hit hard before—God, she’s _Batgirl_ , she’s used to getting hit—but this one’s a doozy.  Quick but stumbling, she draws herself up to a stand and dodges the next blow. In her head, she’s already doing a mental assessment of her physical condition.  She’s fairly sure she has a concussion, and the room can’t seem to stop spinning, but this is all ok, she thinks to herself. She’s just fighting a guy who has a crowbar, and she’d been lazy and gotten whacked pretty hard against the back of the head.  Even with her cowl on, she knows she has a concussion, and that knowledge pisses her off a bit.

Halfway up into standing, she loses her balance from the dizziness and drops down onto her knees right as she hears the man she’s fighting let out a loud cry of pain.  Barbara takes a breath and tries to stand back up again when suddenly, someone else is pulling her to her feet.  _Oh, God_ , she thinks, _I’m about to get my ass kicked.  Severely, severely kicked_.

But she’s greeted by a face that’s familiar.  Or it _should_ be familiar. What she sees is a flesh-colored swirl surrounded by black hair.

“We have _got_ to stop meeting like this,” the swirl says, and his voice cues her in.

“Dick…?” she asks, and then her world goes dark.

* * *

 

When Barbara wakes up, she has no idea where she is.  It’s not because she’s concussed.  She genuinely doesn’t know where she is.  As she pushes herself up into a seated position, she’s careful not to move too quickly.  Her head aches a little, and she’s just the slightest bit dizzy, but she’s still in control of her mind and her movements.  Just as she starts trying to remember the last thing that happened, she hears that voice again.

“Babs?”

Barbara’s eyes dart over towards the direction of the direction of the voice, and she sees that same flesh-colored swirl looking out from underneath Dick’s black hair.

“Babs?” he repeats. “Hey, take it easy.  You took a pretty hard hit to the head.”

“Either I’m way more concussed than I thought, or your face is messed up,” she mumbles groggily.

“Sorry. Forgot to turn that off.” The swirl moves his hand up to a spot behind his ear, and then she sees Dick’s face staring down at her. “Sorry.  That was my Hypnos implant.”

“Ah, yes.  The ever present Hypnos implant that you used to make me think you were an old German guy with a great ass,” she mutters.  Gingerly, she brings her hand to her head and winces, and Dick sits on the edge of her bed.

“That’s the hello I get?  We’ve been apart for a week and a half, and this is the greeting you give me?” he teases, feigning offense. “I just saved your ass back there, Batgirl, and you don’t even give me a kiss.”

“Who the hell said I wanted to kiss you?” she asks with a scowl, but she can’t succeed at making it look genuine because Dick laughs. He always laughs at her, and but really, she’s never minded.  Not when it’s Dick.  Especially not when he’s in this tactical uniform of his, and he, unfortunately, looks great.

“Ok,” he says with a tone of acceptance. “You don’t want to kiss me.”

“Maybe tell me where I am, and I will,” she replies, squinting her eyes at him to make sense of him and the space around her. “This isn’t my apartment, and I know I’ve never seen this before.”

“We’re at HQ,” Dick says.  She frowns a little bit, but he doesn’t add anything else about their location. “After you passed out, we thought it’d be a good idea to bring you here.”

“’We,’” she repeats.

“My colleagues and I.”

“Spyral,” she says for him.  Dick’s face is hard to read as he nods, and she narrows her eyes at him. “Why am I here? Dick, what’s going on?”

“The flash drive.”

That’s all Barbara needs him to say before she’s pushing the blankets off her and swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. “No. I agreed to help, but I didn’t expect to be toted off to…” She pauses as she looks around her, trying to figure out where she is.  She’s annoyed to admit that she has no idea where on Earth they are, but she keeps her frustrated huff to herself. “I thought I’d get to work on this from home.”

“Orders,” he says by way of apology. “I don’t get to fight them, Babs. _Especially_ not after that stunt I pulled…you know.  The whole disappearing off the face of the Earth for a few days without letting Spyral know what I was up to thing.  That kind of clued my boss in on anything, and she shut me down quick.  Anything you do on that flash drive…it’s going to have to be here.”

“I don’t even have the flash drive on me,” Barbara points out, but Dick just shakes his head.

“We stopped by your apartment first.  Frankie told us you were out, and that’s how I knew.”

“Knew I was off being Batgirl.”

“Yeah.” Dick reaches into the pocket of his tactical pants and produces the flash drive. “I took a quick detour.”

Barbara’s mouth twists to the side as she takes the flash drive from him. “Good reminder to be more careful where I put my things.”

“Also snagged your laptop. I know you feel more comfortable working on that than another computer,” Dick adds, having the decency to look a little sheepish over having gone through her things.

“Thanks, I guess,” she drily replies, and she looks down at the flash drive. “So I was kidnapped, shipped to God knows where, and pressured into selling my soul to the devil all because of this tiny little thing.”

Dick’s conscience flares up, and he looks sheepish again. “I’m sorry. I don’t really approve of Spyral’s methods.”

“I know,” she says with a small sigh. “Sorry.  I’m just…trying to take this all in.  And with all these new developments going on here, I actually have some developments of my own to fill you in on.”

Dick perks up a little bit, leaning in just a few centimeters towards her. “Flash drive stuff?”

“Forget about the damn flash drive, Dick,” she says, sighing as she closes her eyes. “I found out who sent me the text message about your mission. The one with the address?”

“Oh. Oh, yeah,” Dick says. Honestly, he’s forgotten all about the text message.  With everything that’s been going on at Spyral and with Barbara, the initial text message has been wiped entirely out of his mind until now. “Who sent it?”

“It actually wasn’t that hard to figure it out,” she replies. “It was Alfred. He heard over Bruce’s comms that you were going to be in Burnside on a mission, and he used one of Bruce’s phones to text me.  He said he knew I wouldn’t believe you were alive if he just straight up told me the truth, and I guess that’s true, but…yeah.”

“Alfred,” Dick mumbles under his breath. “I’m not really surprised. Now that you mention it, I’m not surprised at all.”

“He’s the most obvious choice, right?” Barbara gives a small laugh, and she shakes her head. “I feel like an idiot for not seeing it straight away.”

“Me, too,” Dick agrees, looking just as bewildered. “Bruce would be disappointed in us.”

The mention of Bruce makes Barbara’s heart fall a little bit, and she looks away as she delivers the next piece of news. “No development on his memory, by the way.  I asked Alfred when I went to go see him a few days ago, and…nothing.  I had to stop by when I knew he wasn’t in the Manor because I didn’t want to overstep any boundaries.”

“Alfred still pushing the whole ‘Leave him be’ agenda?” Dick asks, and Barbara nods in response.  She’s quiet for a few moments, and then she sighs, lifting her eyes up to look at him. He looks the same since the last time she saw him.  He’s strong and solid, confident even as he sits relatively still in front of her. She catches the movement of his knee bouncing, and she bites back a tiny smile—he’s always had such an issue with sitting still.  Even when they’d been kids, he’d been a ball of energy, bouncing off the walls and always on the move.

“Babs? What’s on your mind?” Dick’s voice is softer, and Barbara is thrown back to all the times he’s asked her that before. She keeps looking at him, perfectly silent, and then she smiles a little bit.

“Just trying to process everything. You died, Alfred conducted his own little undercover thing, I found out you were alive, Spyral discovered my identity, and then I was dragged to your headquarters.  It’s all a lot to wrap my mind around.” It’s still so easy to talk to him, she notices.  She’s just talking, and she feels like he’ll understand her because he does.

“It’ll be ok,” he says.

“Will it?” she challenges without pausing to consider his words. “Will it be ok, Dick?”

She watches his shoulders slump forward, barely noticeable, but she knows his body language and his emotional responses enough to catch it. He takes a slow breath, and then he shrugs.

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly. “I don’t know if it’ll be ok.”

“That’s all I wanted to know.” She doesn’t break his gaze. “I just wanted to hear the truth.  For once.”

“Then I don’t know,” he repeats, still looking straight at her. “I have no idea if everything will be ok, but Babs…Barbara…I’m doing everything I can to make sure it will be.”

“Ok.” She nods. “I accept that. I can live with that.”

“Yeah?”

“Mmhmm.” She nods again. “I just want to know that you’re not giving up. That I’m not giving up. I need reassurance that we’re going to do our damnedest to make sure we get out of this.”

“You have my promise,” Dick says solemnly, so solemnly he reminds her of Bruce. “I swear it.”

And the thing is, Barbara believes him.

* * *

 

_Five years ago_.

 

Barbara doesn’t like Dick Grayson.  She doesn’t know what it is about the billionaire’s ward, but she doesn’t care for him much.  Maybe it’s the way he so easily laughs at everything and everyone, but it’s probably just how everyone else looks at him.  It doesn’t escape her notice that people, particularly people their age, are staring. It also doesn’t surprise her. Dick Grayson is Bruce Wayne’s adopted son, and he, as much as she doesn’t want to admit it, is handsome.

“Do you want some more sparkling cider?” he asks her.

“Yeah,” she says vaguely.  She isn’t really paying attention.  She’s watching the dancers out in the middle of the floor, silently wishing she were one of them. Dick takes her glass, and he follows her gaze out towards everyone else. 

“Do you want to dance?” he asks, sounding interested in an entirely new way now.

“No,” she lies because she doesn’t want to dance with _him_.  Something about the idea of dancing with Bruce Wayne’s ward rubs her wrong, and she can tell by the way he looks at her that he’d like to dance with her, so naturally, she doesn’t want to dance with _him_.

“You sure?  You look like you’d be a great dancer,” he points out. “I bet we’d be good partners.

She gives him a look, and even though she doesn’t want to smile, she does. “You really think that?”

“Yeah. Want to prove me wrong?” He smiles back at her, and even though she does _not_ want to dance with him, she wants to prove him wrong.

“Yeah,” she says. “I do.”

“We’ll be great partners.”

“We’ll see,” she says as she lets him take her drink.  She hates being wrong, and she desperately wants to be right this time around.  As Dick takes her hand and leads her out to the dance floor, she feels people watching, but she doesn’t care.  She wants to be right _very_ much.

However, her plan backfires because Dick is a great dancer. At the age of 16, he’s sure and confident in his body, and he knows how to move.  Barbara isn’t used to that, and after a few seconds of trying to throw him off by the fact that she’s leading, she has to resign herself to the fact that he was right.  As if he knows what she’s thinking, he laughs.

“I told you,” he says, his voice a quiet dare. “I told you. We make great partners.”

* * *

Dick and Barbara are quiet for a few moments, just looking at each other, and it hits Barbara for the millionth time just how _easy_ it is to be with him.  They don’t even have to speak, and she feels comfortable sitting with him in silence like this.  She opens her mouth to speak, but she forgets the words bouncing around in the back of her brain because Dick speaks first.

“May I kiss you?” he asks, his voice quiet.  Barbara blinks in surprise, and he blinks back at her, but then she nods.

“Yeah…I…uh huh.  Yeah.”

Barbara stares at him as he leans forward and kisses her so gently it’s more like a question than anything else.  It’s a request, a simple, quiet request for consent, and she gives it to him just as he places his hand on her back.  His fingers press into the fabric of her Batgirl costume, and she places her hands on his chest, feeling his broad, solid musculature.

Dick pulls her in closer to him and deepens the kiss each time his lips meet hers.  Barbara leans into him, feeling her body light up with heat and movement, and she unconsciously starts tugging at his shirt.  Silently, he mirrors her movements and tugs at her Batgirl jacket until it’s unzipped and down past her shoulders.  When he pulls it off, it lands in a neat pile on the floor, and then he goes back to removing the cream-colored cami she’s wearing underneath her jacket.

Still without saying a word, Dick moves his mouth from her lips to her shoulder, kissing her warm skin.  His hands travel farther South and begin undoing her light purple pants. Slowly but surely, he takes his time undressing her and allowing her to undress him until they’re pressed against each other, wearing only their underwear, their hands or mouths never once straying from each other.  Barbara notices how easy it is to get him to play along with her, to lift his arms and let her pull his shirt up.  To pull back just long enough for her to pull his pants down and past his knees.

When they’re both nearly naked, Dick really takes her in his arms, and the feel of his bare skin is Heaven to her.  He kisses her collarbone—one of her favorite spots—as he gently pushes her back down onto the bed.  Suddenly, just as Barbara’s really starting to get _into_ it, he pauses. “You have a concussion.”

“I’m ok,” she says quickly. “I’m not feeling that out of it. I’m aware of what I’m doing, and I only have a small headache.  I’m ok.”

Dick pauses, his blue eyes searching her face. “You sure?”

“Positive. I’m 100% sure,” she says, and she lightly pats his face for emphasis.  For a second, he looks surprised at the sudden cheek pat, but he accepts it with a smile as he goes back to kissing her.  He kisses his way from her lips to her neck and lingers there, reading her body language to tell that that’s a spot she particularly likes. But even despite his brief pause there, he doesn’t _stop_ there. Slowly, he kisses each inch of her body as he moves downward.  Again, he lingers at her breasts, kissing the valley between them and the gentle curves that they make above her bra.  His tongue lightly skims over the skin of the swell of her breast, and Barbara takes a slow breath inward.  This is so different from the time they’d had sex before he’d left for Spyral. Then, it had been impassioned, even a little frantic and needy.  But now…now it’s slow and hot, like coals smoldering.

Dick pauses when he reaches her hips.  Silently, Barbara thanks herself for remembering to put on cute underwear even though she hadn’t been planning for anyone to see them. She holds her breath as she watches his lips press against her hipbone.  She’s so enthralled by the combined sensation and sight of it that she almost misses the brush of his thumb hooking into the band of her underwear on the opposite side from where his mouth is.  As Dick’s mouth moves closer to the center of her body, his other thumb hooks into the band on the side he’s just left.

Barbara understands what he’s planning on doing, and she nearly dies right then and there.  As slowly as ever, Dick draws back from her and eases her underwear down over her thighs, then her knees, and finally her ankles before tossing them off to the side. She wants to look to see where they landed so she won’t have to fight to find them later, but she physically cannot do anything but stare at the man in front of her as he gently nudges her thighs apart and kisses the inside of her knee.

“Dick—“ she breathes, breaking the silence between them, but she’s unable to say anything else because he’s kissing his way up her inner leg. Her throat goes completely dry as he nears the apex of her thighs, and then he pauses as he approaches the place she wants him the most.  And then he looks at her.  He looks at her with stormy, blazing blue eyes that make her heart and her muscles jolt together. As he leans forward, he keeps his eyes on hers, and he puts his mouth on her.  Almost instantly, her body jerks.

“Dick,” she gasps out.  Dick’s tongue lightly flicks over her clit, and a jolt of electricity zaps up her entire body. As she learns very quickly, Dick doesn’t mess around when it comes to going down on her—he does what he does, and he takes no prisoners when he does it.  His tongue dips into her, moving and manipulating her in the most vulnerable way possible as she rocks her hips and threads her fingers through his thick, black hair. At the feeling of her hands in his hair, Dick groans.  The vibrations of the sound add an extra sensation between her legs, and Barbara lets out a choked gasp of pleasure.  Relentlessly, his tongue continues to move against her, wasting no time in building her up.

Dick senses her body tightening, and he slows his movements. Carefully, he licks along the length of her, testing how she’ll react.  Sure enough, she jolts against his mouth and finally lets out a low vocalization. Gentle and encouraging, he begins to probe her again, allowing his tongue to flick around her clit. He presses his tongue firmly against her, and it’s with that change of pressure that she knows it’s only a matter of seconds before she reaches her peak. Right away, she feels that deep swell between her legs begin to rise towards the top.  Her fingers grasp his hair tightly, needing something to grab onto to stabilize herself, and with one last flick of his tongue, Barbara reaches the edge, and she cries out as she fell over it into the heat of her orgasm. Pleasure spreads throughout her, and she feels her body lock up as she loses control of her senses and her physicality. 

“God,” she wheezes out.  “Wow.”

She glances down at him and sees him looking ridiculously proud of himself as he kisses her inner thigh before moving back up the length of her body. She’s never doubted his skills with his tongue, but she can’t help looking up at him in shock as he moves himself over her.

“Hey,” he greets, and then he presses another kiss to her neck.  She’s quiet as she sighs and readjusts herself beneath him so she can cradle him better between her thighs.  His hand tucks beneath her, and he deftly undoes her bra in one, smooth gesture.

“Condom?” she asks, and he nods, pulling back to grab his pants. She watches him rummage around in his pockets, and she grins. “Were you planning on getting laid?”

“Don’t use such fowl language,” he mockingly scolds as he produces a condom. “I’ll pull an Alfred and act all horrified over explicit language.”

She groans but smiles at the same time. “I don’t want to think about Alfred right before we have sex, Dick.”

“Then speak nicely,” he says, smiling back at her as he leans down to kiss her and spread the length of his body out over her again. Even though he hasn’t been gone from her for long, she likes feeling the warmth of his hard body stretched out above her, and she places her hands on his face, kissing him deeply. Her tongue delves deep inside his mouth and intertwines with his tongue. 

God, Barbara wants him, and she needs him, and she can’t think of any other way to tell him.  Her hands run down his chest and the hard, muscled plane of his stomach to his hips. Eagerly, she pushes his boxers down around his knees, pausing as he moves to kick them off so they can join the rest of their clothes on the floor.  They’re both suddenly very naked and very exposed to each other, and suddenly a thought comes into her head. 

“Can Spyral see us?” she whispers.  Dick’s face changes, conveying that he hasn’t thought about this.

“Uh…well…I disabled my Hypnos,” he says. “I…if they’re watching, they can’t see through that.”

“But are there cameras in here?” she asks.

“I hope not.”

Barbara and Dick stare at each other, and for a brief moment, Barbara considers calling this whole thing off, but Dick’s body feels so good against her, and she’s missed him so much.  If Spyral’s watching, she hopes they aren’t being judged _too_ harshly, and she kisses Dick hard on the mouth. After a few moments of hardcore making out that would make their teenage selves very jealous, Dick pulls back to look at her.  His blue eyes are dark and bright all at once, filled with the emotions that whirl around within them. Barbara’s always loved his eyes—they’ve always been so expressive, even though Dick likes to think that he’s a hard map to read.  But he isn’t. At least, not to Barbara. She can read him in his entirety with one look at his eyes, and as she looks at him now, she reads everything he could never find the words to say.

All of Dick’s weight is on his elbows, and he slowly and effortlessly leans down to kiss her.  He’s nothing but tender, and it nearly brings tears to Barbara’s eyes all over again. He settles neatly between her thighs, and she feels his erection pressing into her hips.  Moving upwards, she positions herself just right so they can feel each other, and she watches as Dick’s jaw clenches.

“Jesus, Babs,” he groans, his eyes fluttering a little bit.

“Condom,” she reminds him, and he grins cheekily as pulls back again to open the condom and roll it down over his impressive size.  As he lowers himself back down to her, he looks at her, and he knows that they’re both in this together.  He puts one hand on her hip to signal to her, and she nods, knowing instantly what he’s going to do.  Dick kisses her jaw, and with one slow, easy thrust, he slides inside her. Immediately, Barbara arches her hips, Dick groans, and without hesitating, he begins to move.

He starts at a slow, languid pace, pulling back until he’s almost all the way out and then pushing slowly back in.  Barbara’s body is flexible beneath him, and she moves in tandem with him, easily accepting the movement inside her.  Her arms reach under his shoulders, and she gently draws him closer to her, sighing when he tucks his head against her collarbone.  Dick pushes and pulls, and she meets him thrust for thrust. As she grips his shoulder blades beneath her hands, all she can think to herself is, _You’re alive.  You’re alive._

“Ah, God,” she moans, and Dick picks up the pace of his thrusts. Working himself over her, he feels that familiar, glorious pressure building up behind his hips as he continues to deeply drive himself into her body.  His head grows fuzzy with his oncoming orgasm, but he fights it. He’ll be damned if he comes before Barbara, and so he finds that spot on her neck between her jaw and her ear, and he presses his tongue there lightly.  Without pause, Barbara’s nails dig into his back, but he doesn’t feel any pain.  All he feels is that continuous increase of pressure, and he makes his strokes inside her more even and solid.  Concentrating and silent, he slides one arm beneath her lower back, forcing her hips to tip sharply upward, and almost immediately, Barbara begins to tighten around him.

That same warmth and electricity she’d felt between her legs when he’d gone down on her earlier builds much more quickly than it had the first time, and it almost overwhelms her.  Her breath catches in her throat, and when he sinks into her again, she loses all control. It’s like her entire body goes numb, and she can’t feel anything but please.

Barbara comes, and she moans out something like Dick’s name, and at that, he can no longer hold back.  With a low moan, he comes hard inside her.  His body jerks and shudders as his orgasm takes him to a place deep inside himself that he hadn’t even known existed.  He can barely breathe, but he manages to gasp out the shortened version of her name that she only reserves for people she loves.  Slowly, his hips move against her as he milks his orgasm for everything it’s worth.  He can’t remember the last time he’s felt like this—so out of breath and vulnerable and out of control.

Dick collapses on top of her, and Barbara wraps her arms around him as they both come down together. “I’ve got you.  I’ve got you.”

“God, Babs,” he groans into her ear. “Jesus.”

“I’ve got you.” She closes her eyes and squeezes them shut. If she’s still enough, she can feel his heart pounding in his chest, and so she goes very, very still. She goes still, and she presses her mouth against his temple. “I’ve got you.”


	7. Part III: Conviction

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutouts to haecates, Meggerrsss, Autumn_Froste, jamiemadrox, a2zmom, and Toni for reviewing!
> 
> Again, there are some flashbacks in this chapter that I'm just kind of estimating when they happened due to context clues from the comics (that I remember) and my own guessing, so it may not be 100% accurate! I'm also taking some liberties with how Dick and Barbara met as Batgirl & Robin for the first time, as was shown in Batgirl #45 (an issue that I'm ENTIRELY ignoring and most definitely is not considered canon for this fic), so this is all part of my own creation.
> 
> Song recommendations:  
> "Sorry (Acoustic)" - Justin Bieber  
> "Kryptonite" - 3 Doors Down

“So is this how we handle all of our emotional issues now?” Barbara wiggles a bit in Dick’s tight embrace, smiling as he just locks onto her a little tighter. “We don’t really talk about things, and then we have sex?”

“No,” Dick replies.  His voice is muffled from his mouth being pressed against the bare skin of her shoulder.

“No?”

“No. We don’t really talk about things, and then we have _amazing_ sex,” he corrects, and his response merits him a small slap on the forearm from Barbara as she wiggles free.  When she gets out of his arms, she leans over and gives him a quick kiss on the lips before looking around for her clothes. 

“That’s some big talk there, Grayson,” she says, but she’s smiling. “And as much as I’d love to lie here in this strange bed in this strange room and give a play by play of all the moments I liked, we do run the risk of being walked in on at any moment.”

Dick lets out a low groan because he knows she’s right, and he catches his shirt with quick, easy reflexes as Barbara tosses it to him. Even though he hasn’t been around her in a long time, not _really_ , anyway, he sees her doing that thing she always does whenever she’s in seriously emotional relationships.  Hell, they’d just been through this the week before.  She shows emotions, how she really feels, and then she quickly bottles it up and moves onto the next thing so she doesn’t have to talk about where they’re supposed to go from there.  He recognizes the symptoms in her just then, and he wants to confront her, but he knows that that’s probably the worst thing to do when it comes to her.

They’d had sex last week.  Dick remembers that all too well, and he knows she does, too, but there was something different about it this time.  Before, they’d been eager and ready to scratch an itch that they’d felt for years but had always ignored.  Before, they’d been trying to get in whatever they could before he had to leave. But this time…this time it had been slow and gentle, intense but supportive.  It had been like nothing he’d ever experienced before, and he wants to know if Barbara feels the same.

Quietly, they both get dressed, and he sits on the edge of the bed as Barbara pulls her cowl back on. Dick stifles a yawn, lifting his arms above his head to stretch. “Helena will want to check on us soon.  Probably explain to you why you’re here and stuff like that.”

“Because I can’t figure that out on my own?” Barbara asks as she lifts her eyebrows.  That’s another thing about her that hasn’t changed, Dick’s noticed.  She’s never been one to let anyone else underestimate her abilities.  Whether she’s fighting or hacking into some files with clearances attached to them that should have be impossible to access, she always makes sure that everyone knows she’s capable of doing it.

At first, Dick thought that that was her way of making sure he, Bruce, Tim, and Jason knew that she was just as good as they were, and even now, Dick believes that to be the majority of her motivation.  But after Barbara was shot, after her surgery, she’s been even quicker to jump on top of a situation to make sure everyone knows she can do it. She’s not focusing solely on any potential—though unconscious potential— sexism coming through his mannerisms or his words. She’s making sure no one treats her any differently because she used to be in a wheelchair.

Dick knows Barbara will never admit this, nor will he ever try to make her own up to it, but he always remains aware of her motives whenever she makes that cocky smirk and asks, “Because I can’t figure that out on my own?”

“Ok, Batgirl,” he says back to her now, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “Since you think you’re so smart.”

“I _know_ I’m smart,” she shoots back, and just like that, it’s like they’re teenagers all over again. Being with her now is like living in the past, and for Dick, that’s strange.  One thing about him is that he always looks forward, even if he doesn’t plan for the future.  He might be without a plan, without a single strategy in mind for how to tackle tomorrow, but he’s always looked towards the future than towards the past. It’s one of the many things that has set him apart from Bruce since Day One.

“And I know you know you are,” he retorts back to her. He pushes himself up off the bed and moves towards the mini-fridge in the room. “Want water?”

“No, I’m ok,” she replies. “I should keep working at that flash drive.”

“Not until Helena gets here,” he says as he glances over his shoulder back at her. “It’s better to wait for orders.”

Despite herself, Barbara lets out a quiet sigh. “Some things don’t change.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dick asks, even though he knows exactly what it means.

“New song, same routine,” she replies flatly. “First, you took orders from Bruce, and now you’re taking them from Spyral.”

Dick takes a bottle of water out of the fridge and turns around to face her, his mouth turning down into a frown. “I can’t _not_ take orders from them, Babs.  I have to.  This is my job now.”

“Oh, I know.” She leans back against his dresser and folds her arms over her chest. “But I just think it’s not that different from the old days. Spyral hasn’t even given you an order, and you’re already acting like the perfect little soldier.”

“Perfect little soldier?” he repeats, frowning now as he leans back against the fridge, water bottle in hand. “What does _that_ mean?”

“You’ve always been Bruce’s soldier, Dick,” Barbara replies. “You’ve _always_ done what he asked, and the only times you haven’t, it was like World War III broke out, and everyone had to tiptoe around the both of you.  Hell, that’s one of the reasons why you became Nightwing.”

Dick frowns even more, disliking what Barbara’s saying. He’s gotten the jabs from Jason, Tim, Barbara, and even Damian before about always following Bruce’s orders, but it’s been years since he’s actually been the receiving end again. As soon as he’d dropped Robin and turned into Nightwing, the others had left him alone.  He’d been alone then, a lone figure much like Bruce liked to think he was.  Nightwing hadn’t taken orders from anyone, and the only time he took what Batman had to say into account was when he went to Batman for advice, when Batman came to him needing backup.

Having Barbara here, having her right in front of him, is like being a kid again. It’s like he’s Robin, and she’s Batgirl, even if they’re both wearing two different costumes, and even if they’re in two different places in their lives.  Deep down, he kicks himself for letting her comment about being Bruce’s soldier get to him.  He’s too old for this, he tells himself.  He’s too old to still feel the pressure of being Bruce’s original—his original ward, his original Robin.

“It’s not quite like that, Babs,” he says carefully before taking another sip of his water.  He doesn’t want to get into anything with her, but he’ll also be damned if he lets her think she’s right on this.  She gives him a look and folds her arms over her chest.

“No?” she asks. “Then what’s it like?  Because it seems an awful lot like Bruce told you to join Spyral, and even if you fought him a little bit on it, he won.”

“It was my _choice_ , Barbara,” he says, unable to keep the tension out of his voice when he uses her full first name. “He asked me to, and I didn’t want to, but I made the choice. He didn’t make me do anything. I made that choice to protect you. To protect Red Robin and Red Hood. I thought you understood that when we talked last week.”

“And I _did_ ,” she says back. Her eyes flash in that way they always do whenever she’s angry, but her voice still remains relatively calm as she struggles to keep her emotions in check. “I still do, Dick. But even if I understand your choice, even if I know I’d do the same thing, I still can’t help thinking that you wouldn’t have done this if Bruce hadn’t told you to.”

“He didn’t _tell_ me to, he _asked_ —“

A knock on the door interrupts Dick’s retort, and he moves forward to go answer it, barely glancing at Barbara when he passes her.  He’s beyond irritated and frustrated now, but he doesn’t want to fight with Barbara.  He doesn’t want to start anything with her, especially after the moment they’d just had there in her bed.  As he thinks about her, how she’d opened up to him, how she’d whispered his name, he has to swallow and push it out of his head or else he’ll forget why he was even annoyed with her in the first place.  He puts his hand on the doorknob and opens it to see Helena out in the hall.

“Helena,” he greets, his voice not entirely warm but not confrontational enough to be labeled as aggressive.

“Agent 37,” she says back, and then her eyes flick over to Barbara. “Batgirl. I was hoping to meet with the both of you to talk about your mission.”

“Mission,” Barbara mutters just loud for Helena to hear the disdain in her voice.

“Yes,” Dick says, covering up Barbara’s tone. “We’ll meet you in your office.”

“Excellent,” Helena replies, and then she’s gone.  Dick leans against the doorway and sighs a little bit.

“Ready?” he asks Barbara, listening as her footsteps come up behind him.

“Yep,” she says shortly. “I’m ready.”

* * *

 _Five years ago_.

 

By the time Batgirl is done knocking out all the guys, she’s forgotten about Robin still strapped to the tree.   She pauses, breathing heavily as she looks around at all the unconscious bodies.

“I did it,” she says under her breath, almost like she can’t believe it. She knows she’s a good fighter, good enough to put on this costume and run around at night in it, but she’s still impressed with herself.  It’s not like she ever doubted herself, either—she’s always known she could do it.

“So you’re Batgirl,” Robin says from his spot on the tree. Barbara blinks a few times, and then she looks over her shoulder to see him still tied down. He smiles at her. “Hey.  I’m Robin. You just saved my ass.”

“I can see,” she remarks as she crosses towards him. She folds her arms over her chest and stares directly at him, squinting her eyes at him a little bit. “So you’re the Boy Wonder.”

“That’s what they call me,” he says, the nonchalant cadence of his voice familiar. He keeps smiling at her, but he nods down towards his ropes. “Want to untie me?”

“So you can take credit for all the work I did here?” Barbara unfolds her arms and gestures back at the unconscious men around them. “And you’ll tell Batman it was all you?”

“Batman’s been aware of this whole thing.  He’s tuned into my comms,” Robin replies. “Actually, he was on his way to come give me a hand when you jumped in.  Might want to skedaddle, though.”

Barbara frowns. “What?  Why?”

“He’s not terribly fond of newcomers.  So if you’d untie me before you leave, that’d be great.” Robin wiggles against the rope a bit while Barbara narrows her eyes.  After a few quick moments of debate, she walks towards him and whips out her utility knife, slicing through the ropes easily.

“You don’t think Batman will support me?” she asks.

Robin laughs and shakes his head.  There’s something about it, Barbara notices, something about his laugh that makes her think of someone, but she doesn’t know who. “No. God, no.  Batman barely supports _me_ , and I’m his partner.”

“Doesn’t that get old?” she asks, her frown deepening. “Your partner not having your back?”

“Oh, he has my back,” Robin replies as he steps out of the ropes. He winces as he stretches a little bit to get his blood flowing. “We wouldn’t be partners if he didn’t. He just doesn’t always approve of my insistence on being a part of what he does.”

“No?” She tilts her head to the side, and Robin falters just enough for her to notice. “Robin?”

“You should go,” he says suddenly. “He’ll be here any moment. And don’t worry—I’ll tell him how great you were.”

“And you still don’t think he’ll support what I do?” Barbara asks him. Robin makes a skeptical sound, and he shakes his head, still grinning all the while.  God, there’s something familiar about that mouth…that smile.

“No way, Batgirl.  Just because you make it look easy doesn’t mean you’ve got what it takes.” Robin’s chest puffs out, and Barbara’s half-tempted to punch him just to make him stop grinning and looking like a literal peacock, but she thinks he looks too funny like an actual puffed up bird, so she doesn’t.

“How do you have what it takes?” she asks.

“Conviction,” he answers lightly as he springs into a series of light, effortless back handsprings.  Light, she thinks, watching him.  That’s how he moves. He moves so light it’s like he was born to float through the air.

“And I don’t have conviction?” She crosses her arms over chest again as she feels that frown creep back over her face again.  Deep down, she feels anger start to bubble up. If Robin thinks she lacks conviction because she’s a girl or because she “looks frail,” she’ll smack him.

“No,” he replies bluntly.  He lands his back handsprings and looks at her.  Even though Barbara can’t see his eyes, she knows he’s looking at her earnestly. “But you might have it eventually.  So Batman might not support you, but that doesn’t mean you should stop.”

“Because I should liste—“

“Uh oh.  He’s here,” Robin says, and he moves towards Barbara at lightning speed, pushing her. “Go, go, go.”

“But—“

“I’ll see you again, Batgirl.  I know it.”

Normally, she’d stay and fight him for pushing her, but she’s also not too keen on receiving a lecture from Batman about how she should give up what she’s doing as Batgirl.  And so she takes Robin’s advice, and she hightails it before Batman actually shows up. But he’s already given her approval, she thinks to herself as she makes her way through the shadows. Batman approved of what she’d done at the precinct when she and James Jr. had been taken hostage, and she’d beaten the perp up.  She doesn’t want to think about that, though.  Not right now. Not as she’s darting in and out of the dark, hearing Robin’s words in her head.

_I’ll see you again, Batgirl. I know it._

* * *

 

“So. The mission.” Helena stands up and pulls the interactive board down as soon as Barbara and Dick make their way into her office.  Behind her, Barbara hears Dick close the door, and she feels her muscles involuntarily stiffen. There’s something about being in a closed room with this woman, with this leader of Spyral whom she doesn’t trust, that she doesn’t like, and she tries to keep her body language neutral so she doesn’t give anything away.

“I’m here to hack into your flash drive,” Barbara says. “I know.”

“Yes and no.” Helena’s dark eyes turn to Dick, and he pulls the flash drive out of one of his pockets.  He sets it on her desk and then steps back.  Barbara keeps her eyes on him the whole time, watching how he moves now. A part of who he used to be as Nightwing, even as Robin, is still there, but she can barely recognize him as she looks at him.  He moves like a soldier, like a _true_ soldier. A spy.  Agent 37.

The realization grips her hard, and she has to look away to save face. Panic rises up in her chest for only a moment before she swallows it down, and she looks back at Helena, forcing her face to stay neutral.  Helena looks at the flash drive and then up at Barbara. “Spyral hasn’t exactly been upfront with you." 

“You could say that again,” Barbara replies without trying to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

Helena’s eyes flash, and she smiles a little bit, which confuses Barbara. Barbara has no idea what Helena finds so amusing, but she’s not sure she wants to be in on the joke, too. “The man Agent 37 took down in Burnside is Agent 9, a Spyral agent gone rogue.”

Barbara’s eyes dart over to Dick, and she’s surprised to see his eyes go wide with shock. “So he’s one of you?”

“Yes,” Helena confirms as Dick’s body language turns confrontational. “I received notice that some of our intel had been hacked, but I didn’t know what exact intel had been taken, so I sent word to the intelligence community about a flash drive with infinite storage on it while I tried to locate our agent. I knew that a flash drive with infinite storage would catch your attention, Miss Gordon.”

“So this was a trick?” Barbara asks, her voice rising in pitch and volume a little bit as anger rises inside her chest. “Some stupid trick to get me here and to catch your agent?  Is that what you’re saying?”

“No,” Helena replies.  Her dark eyes are as cool and calm as ever as she gazes back at Barbara. “I knew Agent 37 would be able to track our agent down and catch him, which he did. Right before I leaked the intel on the flash drive’s existence and the possible information on it, I waited until I saw Agent 9 was making his way to Gotham where he’d located a buyer. After that, all I needed to do was leak some coded information in the right places.”

“And how do I play into this?” Barbara asks.  She’s not sure she wants to hear the answer, but she knows she needs to. “As Batgirl and as Barbara Gordon?”

“I needed confirmation of your identity _and_ your help in unlocking the flash drive so I can see for myself what exactly Agent 9 took with him,” Helena says without losing any amount of her cool. “All I needed to do was get you interested.  Get Batman interested, and he’d get you, his little tech genius, interested.”

“Haven’t you heard about Batman?” Barbara asks, her tone biting. “Since you’re so smart and have eyes everywhere?”

“That Bruce Wayne no longer has a memory?” Helena asks back. “Yes, I’ve heard. But I leaked information that I thought would catch the interest of whoever it was who was running your little operation, and it did.  Flash drive with infinite storage plus rumors that it held the identities of the members of the Justice League?  Of course that would catch someone’s attention.”

“Wait,” Dick says suddenly. “You leaked that Agent 9 had a flash drive that supposedly has no storage limit whatsoever?  _And_ has the secret identities of the Justice League?  Are you kidding me?”

Helena shrugs. “Had to get your butler’s attention somehow.” She catches Barbara’s expression and nods just once. “Yes, I know about his involvement with your role as Batgirl and Bruce as Batman.  I’ve had my suspicions for a while now, remember. As soon as Dick Grayson was unmasked, I’ve had my suspicions.”

“Who else knows?” Barbara asks before she can force herself to stay quiet. The panic in her chest wells up again, and she struggles to breathe calmly.

“About you?  No one. Just me.  No one knows that Barbara Gordon is Batgirl, just like no one else knows about Alfred Pennyworth and the part he’s played with the bats,” Helena replies. “My job is to collect intelligence, Miss Gordon. Not share it with everyone.”

“Not unless it has a price,” Barbara corrects. “Or you can use it to your advantage.  Something always comes from this.”

“I guess so,” Helena concedes. “But that’s not why you’re here. I don’t want to threaten you or leak your identity to the world. Doing so won’t benefit me or Spyral any, so releasing who you really are is of no interest to me. I only needed to know so I could confirm my theory about who was _truly_ under the mask.  And I need your help to hack this flash drive.  I need to know what it was that Agent 9 had stolen.  What he was about to sell.”

“And you think I’ll help you?” Barbara can no longer keep the anger out of her voice. “You’re out of your mind.  No.  No, I’m not helping you. You have my identity, but you don’t want to leak it.  You just said that it wouldn’t be of any benefit to you or Spyral, so no.  I’m not going to help.”

“For all I know, the identities of the Justice League very well could be on this flash drive,” Helena says, her impatience finally starting to show. “Anything at all could be on that flash drive.  Could be Batman’s identity, could be the entire Justice League…could be things you and Agent 37 have only dreamt about and never knew could happen. That’s how outrageous this intel could be, but I don’t know because Agent 9 covered his tracks pretty well. And that, Miss Gordon, is why I need you.”

Barbara stares back at Helena, and she tries to process everything she’s just heard.  Right now, Helena’s the enemy.  Helena holds Barbara’s world in her hands, and she has the power to destroy her if she so wanted to. Silently, Barbara chokes down a swallow, and she thinks of what Bruce would do.  What her dad would do.  What she would have done before she’d been shot.  If she agrees, she’s helping the enemy.  But by agreeing, she’s helping Dick.  If she agrees, she’ll make Dick’s life here as Agent 37 easier, she figures, because Helena Bertinelli doesn’t look like the kind of person who’ll just let Barbara’s refusal go unpunished either way.

_What would Bruce do? What would Dick do? What would Dad do?_

She inhales slowly, and when she exhales, she says her answer.

* * *

 _Five years ago_.

 

Two weeks later, Batgirl runs into Robin again.  He’s without Batman, and he’s holding his own in the fight she’s observing, but she can’t help jumping in to help him. Whether she’s just trying to show off or actually trying to be helpful, she’s not entirely sure, but she jumps in, anyway.  Between the both of them, they’re able to get the small band of thugs tied up and immobile for the police, and she starts running, fleeing the scene. She’s arrogant enough to think that she can outrun Robin, but he catches up to her within seconds.

“Trying to pull a Batman on me?” he asks. “Geez, Batgirl, not even _I_ can pull a Batman, and I work with him constantly.”

She looks over her shoulder and picks up her pace. “What are you doing?” 

“Following you.  Hey, stop! Stop!  I just want to talk!” Robin shouts, but Barbara doesn’t slow down. “Alright.  I tried to get you to stop.  Just remember that.”

She’s about to ask what he means by that, but then she feels her legs get tangled up, and she’s tripping over herself.  She barely has any time to brace herself and break her fall, but she manages to hit the pavement without getting too banged up.  Staring at the ground, she struggles to get the wind back in her lungs as she rolls over onto her back.

“Sorry,” Robin says, slowing down in front of her. “I tried to warn you. I just want to talk.”

“What?” Barbara coughs out. “You want to talk?”

“Yeah, I do.” He stands over her and folds his arms over his chest. “Batman’s been watching you.”

“What?” she repeats, though this time it’s out of belief. “Batman’s been—been watching me?”

“Yeah. He doesn’t approve, but he’s been watching your methods.”

Barbara looks up at Robin and gasps, breathing in a deep lungful of oxygen. She coughs a little bit and then pushes herself to sit up so she can awkwardly try to get these ties off her legs. Her eyes go straight to the batarang that the line is attached to, and she sees that that’s how Robin had been able to bring her down.

“What does he think?” she asks.  She doesn’t want to sound like she cares that much about what Batman thinks, but she totally does.  Briefly, she glances up at him and then starts untangling the line from her legs.

“That you’re talented.  Not as polished as I am, but I’ve been trained by Batman.”

Robin’s clearly boasting, and it’s all Barbara can do to keep from rolling her eyes. “Yeah, not all of us have a Batman to train us.”

“You’re talented,” Robin says genuinely. “So I come bearing gifts.”

“What?” Barbara asks for the third time that night.  She pauses and looks as Robin drops a rectangular case beside her.

“Have fun!” he says, and just as she opens her mouth to ask what the hell this is, he pulls out a grapple gun, shoots it to the top of the building right next to him.  He’s gone before she can get any words out.  For seconds, Barbara just stares up at the sky, looking up at the space where Robin had just been.

Little does she know that on the rooftop, Robin is walking towards a figure in black. “I gave her the gear.”

“And?” Batman asks. “Do you know who she is?”

Robin laughs, easy and carefree. “Of course I do.  That long red hair and those green eyes?  I’d know Jim Gordon’s daughter anywhere, Batman.”

* * *

 

“Barbara,” Dick says quietly. “You can’t take this back.”

“I know,” she replies, and she looks him straight in the eyes. “This is my choice, and I’ve made it.  I’ll unlock your stupid flash drive for you.”

Helena leans forward, and for the first time since Barbara’s shown up in Spyral’s headquarters, she looks really, truly interested in who Barbara Gordon is. “Why?”

Barbara looks back, and this time, it’s her gaze that’s cool and collected.

“Because,” she says, and each word is laced with meaning. “I have conviction.”


	8. Proposition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutouts to loversandmadmen, Autumn_Froste, Deezy, Himbug, and jamiemadrox for reviewing!
> 
> One more chapter, and everything should be wrapped up! ^_^
> 
> Recommended listening:  
> "Brothers on a Hotel Bed" - Death Cab for Cutie  
> "Collide" - Howie Day
> 
> As always, please let me know what you think! I love getting feedback! Enjoy! =)

Dick knows Barbara’s purposefully not looking at him as they walk back to the room she’s staying in. He feels anger and determination radiating off of her, and he knows her too damn well to know that those two emotions mixed together are dangerous when it comes to Barbara Gordon. The whole walk back to her room, they’re silent. Neither of them says a word until they approach her door, and she stands aside as she waits for him to unlock it with his Spyral clearance card. Once it’s open, he doesn’t follow her inside. He just stands in the doorway.

“Why are you agreeing to help?” he asks.

“I’m protecting the others,” she replies, refusing to look at him. Dick folds his arms over his chest, and he waits patiently for her to look his way. She’s stubborn, but so is he, and he’ll wait there all day if he has to.

“But if you don’t help, nothing will happen,” he says. “Helena won’t release your identity. She said there’s no benefit in doing so right now.”

“Yeah, but you’re doing your part, and I need to do mine, too.” She still won’t look at him, and it drives him crazy, but he doesn’t say anything. He just sighs and crosses into the room. Barbara’s typing doesn’t even slow down. “I think I’ll only need another hour, and then it should be cracked.”

“That soon?” Dick asks, his eyebrows rising. Finally, she glances at him, and she nods, but she doesn’t let her eyes linger on him.

“Yeah. Your tech is good but not as good as me.”

“There’s that Barbara Gordon confidence I’ve missed,” he says. He’s trying to make her smile, and she _almost_ gives in, but she doesn’t.

“Don’t you have spy stuff to get done?” she asks.

Now he frowns. “Why are you trying to get rid of me?”

“I’m not trying to get rid of you,” she lies, and it’s probably the fact that she’s lying than anything else that makes Dick feel like he’s taken a punch to the gut.

“Yeah, you are. And now you’re lying about it. You’re still mad at me,” he points out.

Barbara scoffs and rolls her eyes. “Ok. Sure. I’m not just annoyed that I was ripped out of my home city so I could come play hacker for Spyral since they know my identity. Yep. That’s not it at all.”

“Barbara,” he says, sighing. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

“Dick, I’m not trying to fight with you, either,” she says, and this time, she doesn’t sound so hostile or sarcastic. She runs a hand over her cowl and sighs deeply, reminding Dick of all the times she’d been overtired when they were both kids running around Gotham the first time. “I’m just tired, ok? I’m used to a lot of shit happening in my life, but this one’s a bit much. Spyral has my identity. They know who I am…they could do anything with that.”

“You look pretty pissed to me, and honestly, between the two of us, I think I have more of a right to get pissed.”

Barbara folds her arms, and she tilts her head to the side. “Excuse me?”

“You’re the one who accused me of following orders…being another one of Bruce’s soldiers,” Dick replies, the disdain showing in his voice. “I think I definitely have the right to be mad here.”

“And I don’t. When, let me remind you, you _took me out of the country,_ you think you have more of a right to be mad at me?” she snaps back incredulously. “God, you’ve always been so self-righteous. Just like Bruce.”

“Oh, like this is the most ridiculous thing that’s ever happened to you.” Dick rolls his eyes now and turns away from her. Angry fire burns in his chest, and he knows she can see right through, see right through that anger and see that he’s more hurt than angry, and that makes him even angrier than before.

“No, Dick, that’s not the most ridiculous thing that’s ever happened to me. The most ridiculous thing was finding out that someone who I considered to be my best friend lied to me about being dead because his adoptive dad told him to. And you did it. Because who gives a shit that everyone you loved thought you were dead? Who gives a shit that we all had to build our lives up after that? Because clearly you and Bruce didn’t. At least not enough to clue us in. You easily could’ve let us know you were alive while still faking your death to the world. You could’ve done it, and Bruce could have, too. But no. It’s always got to be the hard way with you two. It’s got to be the complicated way because God knows that if you take the easy way, then it’s just not worth a damn,” she spits at him.

When she’s done talking, Dick just stops, and he looks at her. For a long moment, neither of them speaks, and they can both sense the tension in the air. If Dick really thinks about it, he’s not surprised to hear all of this coming from her. She’d been such an angel about accepting his deception before that he’d known deep down that it had been too good to be true. He stares at her, and she stares at him, and then she runs a hand over her cowl again, though this time, she has the decency to look embarrassed.

“I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “That…I didn’t mean to say all that.”

“You did,” Dick replies. His tone isn’t biting, nor is it angry. It’s just matter of fact.

“Ok,” she sighs. “Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. I don’t know. But I still shouldn’t have said it. It’s…it’s not fair to you. I _know_ I would’ve done the same thing if Bruce had come to me. I have no doubt in mind that I would’ve eventually agreed to it, and I have no right to yell at you like this.”

“I deserve it.” Dick doesn’t look her in the eye now as he glances instead towards her computer. If he looks her in the eye, he’ll leave, and he’s not sure that that’s what he wants to do just then. “You’re right. Bruce and I could’ve figured out a way to let the family know, but we didn’t. It wasn’t right to anyone.”

Silently, Barbara shakes her head, and then she takes a shuddery breath. “I think I’m a little angrier than I thought I was.”

“I think you are, too,” Dick bluntly agrees. This time he looks at her, and she’s staring straight back at him.

“So what now?” she asks. “My program’s still running a decryption on the flash drive. So…what do we do now?”

Dick sees the regret in her eyes, but he also sees a challenge. He doesn’t know what she’s challenging him to, but she’s Barbara. It wouldn’t be right between them if there wasn’t a challenge of some kind. Right now, the easiest thing for him to do would be to leave. He’d leave and go wait in his room until the program was done, and she had the intel, but he’s never taken the easy way. Like Bruce, like Barbara said, if he takes the easy way, then it’s worth nothing at all.

“Well,” he says, sighing a little bit as he pulls out the chair at her desk to sit in. “We wait.”

* * *

_Five years ago_.

 

“Batgirl.”

Batman’s growl nearly throws Barbara off, and she jumps more than she would like to, but she’s not scared to death the way she was the first 10 times he did it. He’s been popping up more and more whenever she’s finished a case. Most of the time, he’s lectured her about her multiple careless mistakes and how she could have avoided them, but there have been a couple times when he’s complimented her. Or at least she thinks it’s a compliment. A low grunt and a, “This could have been messier,” are compliments coming from Batman.

“Batman,” she says, greeting him with a suspicious gaze. “What brings you to my neck of the woods tonight?”

“Gotham City is technically _my_ neck of the woods,” Batman corrects her, which might be the longest sentence that _isn’t_ a reprimand he’s ever spoken to her. “I’m just letting you work in it.”

“And why’s that?” she asks. “You think I’m good or else you wouldn’t be letting me do this.”

“I’ve tried to stop you multiple times, but you won’t give it up.”

“Is this another lecture about how I’m going to get hurt because I’m not properly trained?” Barbara sighs deeply. “We’ve already been through this, and I keep asking you to train me, but you won’t. How am I supposed to stay safe the way you want me to if you won’t train me?”

“I’m going to train you,” Batman says. He doesn’t beat around the bush or hint at it. He just gets straight to the point, and Barbara appreciates that. While Robin is a more likable person—not that she likes him or anything—he can talk himself in circles, and she’s pretty sure he does it on purpose, too.

Barbara stares at him, not even bothering to hide the surprise on her face. “You are?”

“Yes.” Batman’s eyes can’t be seen through the white eyes of his cowl, but Barbara imagines that he doesn’t look very thrilled. “I am.”

“Why?” Barbara asks. She kind of has an idea why, but she just wants confirmation.

“You’ll get yourself killed without it. And I know you won’t give it up. You’re just like your father, and I know that he never gives up.”

Barbara’s eyes go even wider. _Damn_ , she swears in her head. It really shouldn’t surprise her that Batman knows her identity, but she’s thought this whole time that she’s been doing such a good job of staying untraceable. “You…oh.”

“Your father’s a good man,” Batman says. “Robin will bring you to where we train.”

“Where is—“ Barbara can’t even finish the question because suddenly, Robin’s in front of her, and she’s inhaling a scentless spray, and she’s falling.

* * *

It’s three more hours before Barbara’s laptop makes a small sound. Barbara’s head leans against the wall behind the bed, her eyes closed as she rests, but when the ding goes off, her eyes snap open, and she’s over at her laptop in no time.

“Did it work?” Dick asks, stretching and leaning forward to look at Barbara’s laptop with her.

Barbara snorts and gives him an incredulous look. “Of course it worked. I developed this program.”

He holds up his hands in surrender and lifts his eyebrows. “Well. Pardon my slip up.”

“Hm,” Barbara replies, but she leans over and looks at the screen. There’s still awkward tension between them, a tension that feels like a muscle that just doesn’t want to cooperate whenever she’s stretching before training. It’s uncomfortable and even kind of hurts a little bit, but if she keeps pushing through it, everything will be normal again. At least, that’s what she tells herself as she skims over the information in front of her. After a few moments, she frowns.

“Babs?” Dick asks, risking calling her by her nickname instead of her full name. “What is it? Did you find something? How bad are we talking here?” 

Barbara’s frown deepens, and she glances over at him for a few seconds with a mildly confused expression on her face before she drags her eyes back to the screen. “This can’t be right.”

“Babs?” Dick asks again. He stands up now and moves over to her to look directly over her shoulder.

“Well…” Barbara pauses and makes a vague gesture towards the screen. “All he really seemed to take was on a closed case about a meta that you guys wound up taking into your custody, anyway.”

“So nothing else?” Dick feels his forehead start to furrow into a frown of his own.

“No…nothing else. At least not that I can see, but this program I wrote is pretty thorough. It should’ve unlocked the entire drive, and then it should’ve searched all the other files for hidden files.” Barbara scrolls down the open file and clicks on a couple things. “But nothing. There doesn’t appear to be anything else.”

“I don’t know Agent 8, but I looked into his history. He was involved with this case somehow, but I don’t know why he was selling the information,” Dick says, thinking out loud. Then he shakes his head and waves his hand dismissively. “But that’s not for me to think about. That’s not my mystery to solve right now.”

“That’s Helena’s?” Barbara asks, trying not to sound as bitter as she feels deep down.

“Yeah. This is her job. Not mine.” Dick leans away from her a little bit now. “Not anymore.”

“Solving mysteries has always been your thing, Dick. That’s why Batman and Robin started out. Hell, that’s why Bruce let you be Robin in the first place. You were good at it, and he recognized your talent for it. And even when you weren’t Robin, and you were Nightwing, you still solved mysteries,” Barbara points out. For the first time in hours, her voice is soft, and she doesn’t look at him like she’s ready to tackle him. Dick’s gaze lingers on her as he thinks about everything she’s said. It’s true—solving mysteries is what he’s always done since he’s lived with Bruce. His goal was to be the greatest detective ever, or to at least try to match Bruce. But now…now he doesn’t know what his goal is other than to protect his family.

“Well…that’s not my job anymore,” he says. He hopes he doesn’t sound nostalgic or sad because that’s the last thing he needs Barbara to pick up on right now, not when they’re in the middle of this. “My job is to follow orders. Like you said.”

Barbara sighs quietly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I feel bad about it now.”

“You weren’t wrong, though.” Dick shrugs in an attempt to play it off.

“I know I wasn’t wrong. But I feel bad about saying it. It was uncalled for.” She leans against the table and sighs a little louder. “I keep saying the wrong things right now. My damn redhead temperament.”

“Blame it on the concussion,” Dick suggests. He hopes it makes her smile, and he’s rewarded with a small one that tugs at the corners of her lips.

“You’re still a detective, Dick,” she says, her tone gentle now as she moves on from her awkward apology. “Even if you aren’t Nightwing or Robin anymore, you’re still Dick Grayson, and being a detective is what you do.”

“Think so?” he asks, his tone mirroring hers now.

She looks directly at him and nods. “Yeah. I do think so. You’ve always been a better detective. I mean, I’m _good._ I’m not saying I’m bad, but it’s always come easier to you the way computer stuff comes easier to me. I’m a good detective, but I’m _great_ at figuring this stuff out. You’re good at computers, but you’re _great_ at seeing those little things I don’t see at first.”

“That’s a compliment. Coming from you.” Dick wants to reach out and touch her somehow, but that seems strangely intimate and too familiar, especially when there’s still this awkward tension they’re trying to dance around. As Barbara looks at him, she smiles a little again.

“So,” she says, moving on. “What do we do with this information? Just present it to Helena, and then I go home?”

“She’ll probably want to do some outprocessing things. I don’t know. You’re a unique situation,” Dick admits, which makes Barbara smile even bigger.

“Good. That’s what I like to hear.” She looks back at her laptop and scrolls through a few more files. After a couple silent moments, she laughs a little bit.

“Something funny?” Dick asks.

“Well, yeah. I mean…you went through this whole thing—actually, _Helena_ orchestrated this entire event with you coming to Gotham, then Alfred got involved so that I’d discover the truth about you, and _then_ you kidnapped me and brought me here to your headquarters. Everyone went to such huge lengths over this tiny little flash drive, but there wasn’t even anything good on here like the identities of the Justice League. Not even _your_ identity. All we got was intel on a closed case, and there isn’t a hint of any world-endangering information on here, so it’s just…anti-climactic,” she says with a little shrug. “Don’t you think?”

“I guess so,” Dick agrees, a funny expression on his face. “But I don’t really think it was for nothing. I got to see you again, and that’s something I’ve wanted to do for…God, I have no idea. Too long. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to see you again, let alone talk to you, and I got that chance. That right there…who cares about an anti-climactic conclusion to this damn flash drive saga? I don’t. Not when I got to see you.”

“You did more than see me,” Barbara quietly murmurs, and he shakes his head with a small smile.

“You’re deflecting,” he points out.

Something flickers over Barbara’s eyes, but she just smiles sadly and looks down. “Character flaw, I guess.”

They sit in silence for a long couple of moments, neither of them knowing what to do now. With the flash drive having been hacked into, there’s only one thing that that means: Barbara has to leave, and Dick has to continue at Spyral. Neither of them knows when they’re going to see each other again, and that’s an ugly reality they don’t want to face.

Finally, Dick reaches out and puts his hand on hers, his touch unbearably light.

“Character flaw?” he asks softly. “No, Babs. Not with you. Never with you.”

* * *

_Five years ago_.

 

Barbara slowly blinks awake, and she squints her eyes as she stares up at a ceiling she doesn’t recognize. Only half a second of confusion goes by until she remembers her last few seconds of consciousness, and she quickly sits up.

“Hey, take it slow,” Robin’s face says, coming at her from the side. “Sometimes fast movement can make you dizzy.”

“You drugged me,” she accuses.

“It was…more like a spray. But the purpose was to knock you out, so I guess you could say so.” Robin comes out of the shadows, and that’s when Barbara realizes where she is. Squinting her eyes even more, she looks around her.

“Am I in a cave?” she asks.

“Uh, yeah. The Batcave, actually. Home base. Headquarters. Whatever you want to call it. Want any water? We’ve got water. Sometimes taking a spray to the face like that also leaves you with a dry throat,” Robin says casually.

“Why’d you drug me?” Barbara asks.

“Well, we didn’t want you knowing the super secret location of our super secret cave,” Robin replies as if this is obvious. Even though she’s still a little dizzy, Barbara rolls her eyes.

“So I’m here because Batman agreed to train me,” she says. Pushing herself off the edge of the cot she was placed on, she stands up and stretches her limbs. “When do I start?”

“Your dad used the signal, so Batman went to take care of it while I stayed here with you,” Robin answers. “So is that a no to the water?”

Barbara ignores him and starts wandering around the cave. The cave is dark with high ceilings, and yet there’s enough light for her to see the very top of the cavern. Above her and below her, levels surround her and let her know that she’s only on one level. “Jesus. How big is this place?”

“I don’t know. Batman knows. Maybe. I don’t know. He probably knows,” Robin replies with a nonchalant shrug. “But you’re sure you’re ok? No dry throat? No dizziness?”

“I’m ok.” Barbara turns around to look at him, and her eyes take in the sight of him. Sighing, she glances down at his legs. “Your tights are really something.”

Robin follows her gaze, and he scowl a little bit. “They’re not tights.”

“Oh, yeah?” She folds her arms over her chest. “Then what are they?”

Robin looks down at his tights again and tries to come up with something while Barbara laughs.

“Yeah. They’re tights. It’s ok to admit that you’re wearing tights. I won’t judge you any less, Boy Wonder.” She walks to the closest set of stairs and looks down it. “So are you going to train me until Batman gets back?”

“One track mind, huh?” Robin asks, and he’s finally smiling again. There’s something about his smile, Barbara notices. She’s seen it before, but she doesn’t know where. It’s so familiar, so _there_ in the back of her mind, and it’s killing her that she can’t place it.

“Driven,” she says. “Or so that’s what people tell me.”

Robin’s quiet, and she can feel his gaze on her. “You sound like you don’t like that word very much.”

“I don’t,” she admits. “They’re basically using it to call me an obsessed perfectionist freak, so…I don’t really like that description of me at all.”

“But is it true?” he asks, curious.

“I guess.” Barbara shrugs with a frown. “But I still don’t like that word. They don’t mean it as a compliment.”

“Someone not compliment you? That’s wrong of them. You deserve nothing but compliments,” Robin says, an easy smoothness in his voice. Barbara narrows her eyes as she looks at Robin. She knows that voice. She knows that tone. But _how_?

“Are you flirting with me, Boy Wonder? Gross,” she says as she makes a face. She expects him to fumble and apologize, but instead, he surprises her, and he laughs. He laughs like he’s heard the funniest joke in the world, but he’s not laughing in a cruel way. He’s laughing like he’s genuinely enjoying her.

“Barbara Gordon, you’re a very pretty girl, and I’m only a young boy who appreciates beauty,” he says, that same suave tone going strong.

“Hm,” Barbara grumbles, starting down the stairs. “I bet you do. So. Are we going to train?”

Suddenly, she feels a push against her back, and she sees Robin go soaring over her head in a somersault.

“Tag,” he says when he lands, his smile bright enough to illuminate the entire cave. “You’re it.”

Barbara understands what he’s doing, and as she lunges to tag him back, missing him by inches, his smile is so infectious that she can’t help but smile back.

* * *

“Well, this is disappointing,” Helena says with a heavy, bored sigh. She shuts the file and looks up at both Dick and Barbara. “I was expecting something more.”

“So were we,” Barbara admits. She gives Helena a begrudging look and then she looks at Dick. “We definitely thought there’d be something else on the flash drive.”

“Well,” Helena repeats. “I’ll deal with this matter internally.”

Barbara watches Helena lock the file and then close out of it. “So what about me?”

“What about you, Miss Gordon?” Helena asks. “You finished what you said you’d do. As uninteresting as the results were, you carried through on what you said, and I’m going to keep my word, as well. You did great work for us, and I won’t forget that in the future.”

Barbara’s distaste is clear across her face as she nods. “So I’ll be leaving? Going home to Gotham soon?”

“Yes. We’ll arrange a jet to take you there as soon as we can. Does that satisfy you?” Helena asks, scribbling out a quick note on a pad of paper.

“Yes.” Barbara nods now. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. It was a pleasure doing business with you.”

Barbara makes a low snorting sound, and she shakes her head, looking at Helena with a mixture of admiration and disbelief. “I wish I could say the same but…thanks.”

She looks over at Dick as she starts to leave, but instead of following with her, he nods at her to keep going. “I’ll meet you outside, ok?”

Barbara’s eyes flicker from him to Helena and back to him, but she nods. “Ok.”

She’s slow as she leaves, but she leaves nonetheless, Dick’s eyes glued to the back of her cowl. Dick waits until she’s outside, and the door’s shut, and he turns to face Helena. He opens his mouth, but Helena cuts him off.

“Yes. You can escort her back to Gotham. I wouldn’t think of depriving you of an opportunity to say goodbye Dick Grayson-style.” Her voice is dry and her face amused as she finishes writing out her note.

“I had a question, but that wasn’t quite it,” Dick replies. His tone makes Helena look up, and she pauses.

“Then what is it, Dick?”

Dick breathes deeply, stilling his heart, and then he speaks.

“I’d like to go back to Gotham, yes.” He locks onto her gaze so his point will be clear. “Permanently.”


	9. Beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shoutouts to Meek, Autumn_Froste, Emmazing15, and jimcrix for reviewing!
> 
> Alright, here's the last chapter! I know I'm super late in updating this, and I'm so sorry, but here's the very last chapter rounding up the end of this Dick/Babs fic!
> 
> Usual disclaimer that I took liberties with the flashback sequences since current canon is weird on the timeline of when things happen, so I used creative license. Also, I sneaked in a line that was used in preboot Dick/Babs, so if you can find it, let me know ;)
> 
> Also a little warning: there's some graphic smut later on so ;) if you like that, and here's your heads up if you don't!
> 
> As always, please let me know what you think! I live for feedback, so if you liked it, please let me know what you liked!
> 
> Recommended listening:  
> "She Lit a Fire" - Lord Huron  
> "You've Haunted Me All My Life" - Death Cab for Cutie
> 
> Enjoy! =)

The silence goes on for longer than what makes Dick comfortable. Helena’s face is hard to read, but after a few silent moments, she frowns. “Did you seriously just ask me what I think you did?”

“I’d like to stay in Gotham permanently. Consider this my resignation,” Dick says. He stares back at her, challenging her. The longer he stands and looks at her, the more sure he feels that this is the right decision. He wants to go home to Gotham. He doesn’t want to do this anymore. Now that Barbara knows he’s alive? He can go home and fix things. All he has to do is leave.

But Dick isn’t clueless. He isn’t under any false impressions about Spyral or what they’ll allow him to do. He knows that Spyral won’t let him go without a fight because they’re _Spyral_. After all the work he’s done for them, after all the things he’s seen and learned, they won’t let him go without something in return. Hell, he’s not even convinced that they’ll let him go at all, and he _knows_ there’s a chance Helena will turn him down flat. He stares directly into Helena’s eyes, and she stares back into his, her frown still drawing her face downward.

“You can’t do that, Grayson,” she says earnestly. “You know that. You’re a Spyral agent. There’s no such thing as resignation here. This is kind of a lifelong commitment. All the intel you know? There’s no way we’d leave a loose end like you out in the world.”

“Think I don’t know that?” Dick narrows his eyes a little. “I’ve thought it through, Helena. I know you’re going to make me jump through hoops.”

Helena smirks now as she looks up at him, her dark eyes genuinely amused. “Circus analogies? Cute, Grayson. Very cute.”

“Cut it out, Helena,” he snaps. “I want to be done here.”

“Well, you’re not,” she says, sobering up as she goes back into Matron mode. “You’re not done here until Spyral says you’re done, and you’re _not done_. There’s nothing else to say, Dick. I can’t give you what you want right now.”

“And I won’t get it ever,” Dick finishes for her. She stares at him, quiet and brooding, and then she shakes her head imperceptibly.

“Your words, not mine. I don’t make promises I can’t keep, so I’m not going to promise you that you’ll be able to leave when you want to.”

Dick gestures to himself. “Clearly, I can’t.”

“You want out, but you can’t get out.” Helena stands, and she looks him straight in the eye. For a moment, Dick worries that she’s going to use her Hypnos on him, but she doesn’t. “Let’s make a deal.”

* * *

  _Five years ago._

 

“So when are you ever going to tell me your secret identity?” Barbara asks as she easily rolls out of an arm hold, flipping Robin over her. He starts to use the momentum to take her off balance, but she scrambles on top and pins him.

“How about never?” he asks, grinning up at her as he tries to find leverage to overtake her. Barbara pins him even harder and puts all of her weight into it, and she smiles back down at him.

“How is it fair that you and Batman get to know my identity, but I don’t get to know yours?” she asks. “I’m not even asking for Batman’s name. Just yours.”

“Why do you want to know so badly? Got a crush on me or something?” The Boy Wonder beams, and even though Barbara can’t see his eyes behind the white lenses of his eye mask, she can just _tell_ that he’s winking at her. She feels her cheeks go a little pink, and she opens her mouth to protest. Her pause is all Robin needs, and he takes advantage of the moment to flip her over so she’s onto her back.

“Hey!” she exclaims. She looks up at him with shock, and she struggles for a few moments before she goes limp. “Fine. Fine, ok. You win.”

Robin eases off of her and leans back against his hands as he takes a second to catch his breath. “You’re good.”

Barbara doesn’t reply now as she goes over the moves she’d used on him. The only time she’d really slipped up was when he’d asked her if she had a crush on him. Deep down, Barbara could just die. She hates when he uses words like that to throw her off balance, but she knows it’s all a fighting tactic with him. They’ve been training for weeks now, and that’s the one thing that always makes her slip up.

“Hey,” Robin says to her. “Don’t look so down. I just told you you’re good. Not many people are even passable, but you give me a good workout.”

She turns her green eyes onto him, and she glowers fiercely at him. “I’m not here to give you a good workout, Robin. I’m here to become a better fighter. Batman told you to train me, and I’m here for _my_ training. Not yours.”

“Sorry.” Robin has the decency to look mildly sheepish. “You’re right. I’m here to make you better. Not me.”

“God, that’s so annoying,” she grumbles as she stands up.

“What is?” he asks. Even though Barbara doesn’t want him to follow her, that’s exactly what he does.

“The whole, ‘Gee whiz! You’re right! I’m sorry!’ routine,” she says as she mimics his voice. “Don’t you get tired of listening to yourself?”

Robin frowns a little, and seeing his frown gives Barbara some extra sense of smugness because he usually doesn’t frown like this. “Well…not really. I’m being sincere.”

“I know. That’s what makes it even more annoying.”

“What do you want, Barbara?” Robin asks suddenly, and Barbara pauses when she hears the frustration in his voice. “I underestimate you, and you get mad at me, but then when I apologize for something I should apologize for, you get mad at me, too. What can I do to make things right?”

Barbara stares back at him, her eyes cool as she meets his white lenses, those same white lenses that hide who he really is from her.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “I have no damn idea.”

* * *

 “What kind of a deal?” Dick asks through a tight jaw.

“Something you want, and something I need,” Helena says. “I need you here at Spyral. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. I just do. You want to go home to Gotham. We can work with that. Make a compromise.”

“I’m not that interested in compromising,” Dick replies, but Helena cuts him off from adding more by giving him that one shake of her head that he’s come to learn means absolutely no.

“It’s either that or nothing,” she says. She never threatens, but by God, if this doesn’t sound like a threat. “I want to help you, Dick. I know you don’t believe me, but I do. Please let me try to do what I can while still being able to use you to get what Spyral, as an organization, needs.”

Dick’s jaw tightens even more, but he doesn’t fight. “What I want is to go home. Let me stay there, and I can just go out on missions for Spyral from there.”

“I can’t do that,” Helena says immediately. “That’s too simple. We need you here where we can monitor you and your Hypnos implants better. We have a lot of tech and not a lot of time to get you trained on it. It’s also faster to have you work from here.”

Dick opens his mouth to protest. “Then—“

“I’ll send you on all the Gotham missions that come up,” Helena counters before he can get anything out. “Anything in Gotham, it’s yours. No matter the clearance level.   You can go home, and if I can, I’ll have you assigned there for an extra day or two so you can drop in on Batgirl and…say hello.”

Dick hates the implication in her tone, but he doesn’t push it. Instead, he’s quiet as he thinks it over. Gotham missions may or may not come up regularly, but if he’s promised them, then that means he’ll be going back at some point. He won’t be telling Barbara, “Goodbye, I might not be seeing you again.” He’ll be telling her, “Goodbye, I’ll see you when I’m here next time.” It’s not ideal, but Dick’s life has never been ideal, per se.

“Every Gotham mission?” he asks slowly to make sure he understands.

“Yes. Every Gotham mission. Anything within a 30 mile radius to Gotham will be yours, too.”

“And you’ll let me have some extra time there?”

“If I can work it in, yes.”

Dick thinks this over, and he takes a breath. “I want Gotham missions and you to call off the hunt for my family’s identity. You already suspect who they are, anyway. Isn’t that enough?”

Helena frowns, the first real time she’s looked genuinely disturbed by something. “Dick, you know that information is power. I can share my theories with people as much as I like, but it doesn’t receive real power until I have something to back it up. I need my theories backed with DNA confirmation.”

“So that’s a no to calling off chasing their identities.”

“I can’t do that. I can’t agree to that.”

“You _won’t_ agree to it,” Dick argues.

“Fine. I won’t agree to it unless you have a better counter. You want to just go ahead and save me the trouble and get me their samples yourself?” she asks with lifted eyebrows.

Dick physically balks, and he stares at her incredulously. “Like hell.”

“Didn’t think so. Never hurts to ask,” she replies, shrugging. “I don’t have a better counter for you. You take Gotham missions, and I keep searching for their identities. For proof. That’s all I can really offer you at this time.”

“Call off the search,” Dick orders.

Helena’s eyes flash, and she narrows her eyes at him. “You don’t get to make the orders around here, Agent 37, and if I suspect even the tiniest bit that you’re about to activate your Hypnos, then you won’t be doing _anything_. Do I make myself clear?”

Dick’s hands are tight fists, tight balls of energy that long to be let out, but he practices that restraint Bruce has always taught him, and he forces his energy to descend back down inside him. “Call off the search.”

“Agent 37—“

“Call off the search, and I’ll give you intel on their missions. Nothing on who they are as people…but what Red Hood does…where he moves…same with Red Robin. I can tell you about their missions and what they’re doing, but I won’t give you anything more than that.” The words physically hurt Dick, but he makes himself say them. He has to betray his family just a little in order to protect them, and he hopes to God that if they ever find out, they forgive him.

Helena looks at him, steady and calm as ever as she thinks over his proposal. “You’ll tell Spyral about their movements?”

“If I can report directly to you…no documentation of their missions…I can give you their intel. They trust me. They’ll tell me, even if I didn’t ask them to.” Dick hates himself. God, he hates himself.

And he hates Helena for what she says next.

“Agent 37…you have a deal.”

* * *

 “Is everything ok?”

Barbara takes one look at Dick’s face, and she knows that he isn’t ok, but he looks at her and smiles a little bit.

“Yeah. I kind of got a good deal,” he says. “Come on. The jet’s being prepared for our flight back to Gotham, and we’ve got to move.” 

“So…you going to tell me about this good deal?” she asks as she starts walking beside him. She can see the worry and the anxiety all over his face, but she can also see that he’s trying to fight it, so she knows it’s better not to ask. Like Bruce, Dick carries a lot inside himself, and like Bruce, it’s best to let him pretend that he can do it all by himself until he realizes he can’t.

“I asked to leave permanently and was shot down,” he replies. Barbara waits for him to continue, but he doesn’t.

“And…that’s good?” she asks, frowning. “I don’t understand. I thought you said a _good_ deal.”

“Helena agreed to give me all Gotham missions.” Dick glances at her to gauge her reaction now, and he sees the wheels in her head turn as she processes the information.

“Wait…” She slows to a stop and looks up at him. “She’s letting you come back to Gotham?”

“Not regularly…well, I don’t know about that. It could be regular, depending on how many missions pop up there, but if there’s a reason for Spyral to be there, she agreed that I’ll be the presence in Gotham taking care of it.” His blue eyes search her face, and he waits for more of a reaction. One of the reasons he loves looking at Barbara is because she never really shows all of her feelings at once. In a way, it reminds him of Bruce. Bruce is quiet and guarded about his feelings because it’s logical for him to do to keep people at a distance. Barbara, however, does it to hide any vulnerability about her, and while he longs to break down that wall between them, he loves that it always keeps him second-guessing.

“But will I be able to see you?” she asks.

“Yes,” he answers automatically. “Helena promised that if time allows, I’ll have an extra day to see you.”

“That’s…that’s good,” she says, her voice and face thoughtful but still not giving much of a reaction away. “If that’s all I can have…then I’ll take it.”

Dick stares at her for a few seconds, and sees a thousand emotions flicker over her face. “That’s it?” he asks.

“What’s it?” she asks back with a frown.

“I’m…well, I’m telling you that I won’t be able to see you that much, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like…like you’re ok with it?” He sounds like he’s asking her more than stating a fact, but he isn’t sure how to react to her reaction.

She blinks a couple of times and frowns just the tiniest bit more. “Dick, I thought you were dead. I didn’t think I was ever going to see you again. But you’re not dead. You’re very much alive, and you’re standing here in front of me as proof. As greedy as I am for more time with you, I’ll take seeing you even once a year over never seeing you again because once a year means you’re alive. It means you’re alive, and you’re here with me even if you’re not physically with me. So if that’s all I get, then I’ll take it.”

Dick stares at her for a few more seconds, and then he reaches out and puts a hand on the back of her head to draw her into him. Quick and fierce, without thinking about who might be watching them, he kisses her there in the hall. He kisses her in her Batgirl costume, in her cowl. He kisses her, and he doesn’t care. The kiss doesn’t linger long, but it’s long enough to get the point across before he pulls away and looks at her again with those flashing blue eyes of his. 

“Huh,” she says, blinking quickly. “I guess that was a good answer?”

“I…” Dick thinks about how to choose his words. “Yes. Yes, it was a good answer. I’m just glad that you’re glad. I was afraid you’d be disappointed with the result.”

“Am I disappointed I don’t get to see you every day? Yes. But am I disappointed to find out you’re actually alive? No. Everything’s relative, Dick Grayson.” She manages a little smile as she looks up at him.

“I thought you were still mad at me.”

“Oh, yeah. Don’t remind me.”

She smiles when he smiles back at her, and she walks with him to the jet. It doesn’t take long before the jet’s up in the air, and the flight back to Gotham starts. She’s never been overly fond of flying. She does it because she has to, and really, she thinks it’s funny that she, a bat, wouldn’t like flying that much. But bat as she might be, she’s never felt quite at home in a plane. She’d much rather be on the streets, soaring through the air on her cables. At least she can rely on cables because she’s controlling them. With a plane, she can’t really control that. 

But despite her misgivings about planes, as small as they are, she makes herself relax for several hours with Dick until they touch down in Gotham. After that, it’s a quick process of getting home. They can’t exactly take a taxi because Barbara’s in her Batgirl costume, but honestly, she would rather take the Batgirl way home swinging from building to building than riding in a cab, anyway, she thinks to herself.

She ducks into her room through the window over the fire escape. She leaves it open for Dick to follow behind her, but she doesn’t want for him as she opens her bedroom door and walks out into the hall.

“Babs—Babs, hey! Someone could be out there!” Dick calls from behind her.

“No one’s home.” She pulls out her phone and turns around, tossing it to Dick so he can look at the security system she keeps programmed into her latest up to date mobile device, courtesy of the tech department at Wayne Enterprises. Bruce had given all of the members of the Batfamily the prototype to test right before the Joker had come back into their lives and forced Bruce to sacrifice his memory in order to save Gotham. Every time Barbara looks at her phone, she’s reminded of that.

“Oh. Nifty,” Dick says, his tone somewhat disinterested. Barbara stalks out into the kitchen and grabs a bottle of water out of the fridge before taking her cowl off and shaking her long red hair out a little bit. She’s got helmet hair pretty bad, and Dick has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing at how annoyed she is whenever she catches a glimpse of her reflection in the shiny chrome of the kitchen sink faucet.

“I don’t know where Frankie is,” she sighs. “Seems like she and I are never on the same page anymore.”

“What does that mean?” Dick asks.

Barbara reaches into the fridge and pulls out a bottle of water. Quietly, she hands it to him, and then she shrugs. “She wants to help me in the field, but…I don’t know. It’s complicated. I worry about her. She doesn’t need to get mixed up into my life any more than she already is.”

“Isn’t that a choice for her to make?” Dick asks.

Barbara gives him a look, a half-eye roll and a half-smirk. “Grayson, you know you’d be stopping any of your civilian friends from joining up if you could. God, more and more people are becoming vigilantes. Be glad you missed the whole Endgame shit show because some Bluebird person has popped up, and I’m sure given the state Gotham’s in right now, there are more vigilantes running around.”

Dick winces, and he runs a mildly self-conscious hand through his hair. “Would now be a bad time to tell you that I was here for Endgame?”

Barbara blinks a couple of times, and then she sighs. “I’m not surprised by anything when it comes to you anymore.”

“I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”

“Neither do I.” She gives him a good hard look before shrugging it off. “What were you here for? Did Bruce clue you in?”

“I stepped back in the cowl for a second and played Bruce while he made the real attack,” Dick explains. For the millionth time since he’s revealed to Barbara that he’s alive, he looks sheepish. “Sorry. I…I wish I could’ve told you.”

“I know.” Barbara looks at him, but she doesn’t look angry. She doesn’t look hurt or frustrated, either. She just looks at him. “I wish you could have, too.”

“Hey, I’m sorry.” Dick looks ashamed of himself, and he looks away a little bit. “I really am. I know I keep saying it…but I’ll continue to say it until, well, forever because I don’t think I’ll ever not be sorry. So…I’m sorry.”

“If you say you’re sorry one more time…”

“Oh. Sor—“

Dick doesn’t even manage to get halfway through his apology before Barbara’s suddenly up against him, her mouth on his. For a few seconds, she’s horrified by the thought that Dick isn’t going to kiss her back because he’s frozen, but he starts to melt under her touch, and she finally lets her mind ease up. They kiss for several moments, and then Barbara pulls back to look up at him.

“If you can’t make yourself shut up, then I can do it for you,” she says, mostly teasing with just a hint of a question in her voice. Dick looks back down at her with a curious expression, and he dips his head down to kiss her again.

“I’m a bit of a talker. You’ll probably have to do that a lot to get me to shut up,” he replies. He’s always so smooth and casual whenever he flirts, and it’s always gotten to Barbara. She remembers every moment he’s ever flirted with her, and she remembers the sleepless nights afterwards of how she’d asked herself if it had been what she’d thought it’d been.

“When do you have to be back at Spyral?” she asks before going to kiss him again. 

“Soon. I can spare a little time, though…”

For the first time probably ever, Barbara stops thinking. She stops letting her brain control every movement, every action, and she just _acts_. It’s a quick step in towards him so she’s flush against his body, and it’s a quick slide of her hands down his torso to where his zipper is. “Is this ok?”

“God, yeah,” he mumbles as he starts trying to fumble with Barbara’s Batgirl costume to get it off her. However, he doesn’t get far because Barbara’s quicker. She gets his pants unzipped and down over his hips, and Dick can’t even remember his own name when he watches her suddenly sink down to her knees and place her mouth on him.

Barbara knows she’s being risky. Frankie could come home at any moment, and Barbara know it’ll be a hell of a time explaining this to her, but she just stops _thinking_. There’s nothing to think about when she has Dick like this in front of her and so close to her. There’s nothing at all, and Barbara finds something freeing in knowing that they’re the only two who currently exist in each other’s worlds, and that’s ok. She keeps one hand wrapped around the base of his erection, and she uses the other hand to press against his hip, his thigh, his torso. Wherever she can touch him.

It’s barely even a few minutes before Dick’s gently but quickly pushing on her. “Hey, hey, hey.”

She stops and looks up. “Dick?”

She stares at him with puzzled eyes while he pulls her up, but he barely wastes any time before he starts yanking at her costume. He’s got that Dick Grayson smirk on his face, and for once, Barbara doesn’t want to slap it off of him.

“Don’t want to come like that,” he murmurs as he gets her jacket off and tossed aside. “But Jesus, Babs.”

Barbara can’t even find the words to reply as Dick gets her naked in record time. She doesn’t know how they wind up on the floor between the back of the couch and the path to the kitchen, but before she knows it, Dick has her pinned down to the floor with her hands on either side of his head, and he’s grinding against her. They’ve only had sex a small handful of times, but each time has been different, and even this time, Barbara can already tell it’ll be different still.

There’s an urgency to it this time around that has never been there before. Sure, the first night they’d spent together had been filled with urgency and a quiet desperation as they’d tried to take advantage of those few small moments together, but this is just—it’s _different_. Dick takes control in a completely different way than he has, and while Barbara loves being in control—it’s why she doesn’t like airplanes, for God’s sake—she has to admit that she loves watching Dick in control, too.

Dick’s mouth fuses to her collarbone, and she swears she feels his teeth as he sucks a little harder than he should. She starts to open her mouth to tell him that if he gives her a hickey, she’ll kick his ass so hard he’ll forget he ever had an ass, but then his mouth is on her breasts, and oh, she can’t speak when he’s using his mouth like that. She’s quiet as she gasps and breathes hard, arching underneath him, and she tries to reach out and touch him, but Dick holds her still in place.

Suddenly, Dick goes still, and he looks up at her. His chest rises and falls as he pants, and his bright blue eyes as glassy and hazy. “Condom. Need a condom.” 

“I’m on birth control, and last month’s tests came back negative,” she says. She normally doesn’t make decisions like this. She’s the person who always keeps her head around her, but right now, she feels like she’ll die if Dick pulls away from her for even a second. Dick stares at her, and it feels like an eternity, but it’s only a matter of seconds, and then he kisses her hard.

“My tests are clear,” he murmurs into her mouth, and Barbara practically whimpers when she feels him rub the tip of his erection against her clit. She tightens her legs around his hips, and before she really has the time to process it, he’s pushing inside her, and she’s letting him.

This time, just like all the other times before, is different from the last time. It’s rough and quick against the floor, but there’s something intensely intimate about it. Maybe it’s the way Barbara clings to him, or maybe it’s the way Dick clings to her. Maybe it has to do with the fact that there’s nothing between them, and they can feel every bit of each other. But whatever the reason, it’s intimate. Normally, Barbara would shy away from the feelings she’s experiencing right now, but when she has Dick above her and inside her this way, she can’t be bothered to worry about how she’ll feel afterwards. She doesn’t think. She just moves.

It’s almost embarrassing how hard her orgasm hits her. They’re on the kitchen floor in _missionary_ of all positions. Whether it’s a testament to her emotional state or Dick’s sexual prowess, Barbara isn’t sure, but she again, she doesn’t think. When she comes, her mind blanks out, and she waits to feel Dick come, too. And he does. He comes inside her, letting out a low moan against her neck as she feels a hot, thick wetness between her legs, but she holds him close and presses his face even closer against her.

They collapse together, breathing hard and making noise that’s probably louder than it should be, but they’re not paying attention to it. Dick, ever the post-coital cuddler Barbara has realized, immediately wraps his arms around her and tries to snuggle with her on the kitchen floor. Despite herself, she smiles a little. “Dick…Dick, come on.”

Dick shakes his head as he holds onto her. “No. We don’t have to move just yet.”

Barbara could keep fighting him, or she could just take a moment with him, so she stops pushing at his head, and she lies still beneath him. Before long, she starts stroking his hair and rubbing his back. Neither of them speaks for a while, but that’s ok because they don’t have to. They’ve always worked well with silence between them. Actually, now that Barbara thinks about it, silence has never been awkward with them, not even when they’d first gotten to know each other.

“You need to go back,” she says finally, her voice soft.

“I don’t want to,” Dick mumbles.

“We have to get off the floor.”

Dick sighs, but he gently moves away from her, leaving her body feeling cold when he pulls back. They’re both still mostly dressed, only having removed the clothes necessary for access to each other, and it doesn’t take long for Barbara to locate her underwear and her pants. As she finishes buttoning the top of her purple Batgirl pants, Dick takes her wrist suddenly.

She looks up at him and sees a certain look on his face that she hasn’t seen in years. She knows what he’s thinking when he looks at her this way, or at least she’s always suspected his thoughts, but when she looks at him just then, she knows. Quickly, she shakes her head, and she kisses him. “Don’t.”

“What?” he asks, looking a little confused and almost hurt.

“I know, Dick,” she says softly as she looks up at him. “I already know.”

Dick looks at her for a few seconds longer, and then he smiles. It’s not his typical showman smile that makes her heart skip. It’s his quiet, gentle smile that he only uses with the people he loves, and it makes her stop breathing altogether. “I didn’t know I was that obvious.”

“Yeah, well…” She smiles and looks away. “I learned from the best.”

“Babs—“

“I want to save one good milestone for the next time we’re together, yeah?” she asks him as she looks back. “I don’t want to use them all up now.”

“Right,” he says, nodding and smiling as he understands. “Of course.”

He’s quiet for a few moments longer, and then he looks away. “You know…you’re the one thing that’s never changed for me? I mean, yeah, you changed. You got older, and you grew up, but…when I was out there at Spyral, I thought about you. You kept me grounded. And you’ve always done that for me, Babs.”

She leans up and kisses him. “The feeling’s mutual, though if you ever tell anyone, I’ll break those gorgeous hands of yours. Dammit, Dick. I’ve missed you.”

“You were always there during the best parts of my life,” he says quietly. Barbara keeps gazing at him, and he looks back at her, waiting for her to speak if she wants to. He starts to move in towards her, his hands going for her waist, and suddenly, her face screws up a little bit as she realizes she can’t keep the words on her mind back any longer.

“I erased some information off of that flash drive.”

Dick pauses. That was definitely not what he thought he was going to hear from her. “What?”

“There was information that would have incriminated Bruce as Batman so…I took it off. But there’s no way Helena or anyone else at Spyral would be able to spot it. I made it untraceable when I took it off.” Her expression is slightly worried but more than a little confident as she waits for his reply.

“Babs, if Helena finds out…”

“I know. But she won’t. I’m that good, Dick,” she reassures. “I know I promised that I did everything the way I was supposed to…but I couldn’t. When I saw that there was intel that could have really screwed things over for Bruce…I just couldn’t. The less of a digital trail that remains to link Bruce to Batman, the better, and so I just kind of panicked and took it off.”

Dick’s mouth twists to the side, and he looks at her thoughtfully. “You were protecting him.”

“Yeah. I’m protecting all of us. However I can. Just like you.”

Dick’s instinct is to tell her that if Helena really does find out, she’ll be furious, but he knows just by looking at Barbara that she’s aware of the risk. Barbara doesn’t need him mansplaining to her, and honestly, he isn’t even in a position to talk. He can’t tell her about the rest of his deal with Helena, about how he’s going to have to give Helena intel on future Batfamily missions in order to keep her off of their secret identities. He’s not entirely sure she would understand, though he likes to think she would, but he can’t tell her now.

So he doesn’t.

Instead, he simply reaches out and takes her in his arms, and he hugs her. “This isn’t goodbye.”

“No,” she agrees, burying her face into his chest in a way that almost scares her because it’s so easy to suddenly be this intimate with him.

“I’m sorry. I’ll be back,” he promises.

“Good.”

He takes a deep breath, and he closes his eyes. More than anything in the world, he wants to stay here with her. He wants to tell Spyral and Helena to fuck off, and he wants to stay in Gotham with Barbara, with Bruce and Alfred and the others. He wants to be with his family. But he knows he can’t just yet, so he grits his teeth, and he pulls back to look at her.

“I’ll be back,” he repeats. “I’ll come back to you, Babs.”

When he sees Barbara’s expression, he’s almost afraid she’ll cry. Her green eyes are large and extra shiny, and her cheeks are pink, all signs indicating she’ll cry. But she doesn’t cry. She smiles, and when she speaks, and it’s like his heart explodes.

“You always do.”

* * *

  _Five years ago._

Barbara discovers Robin’s identity by accident. It’s purely coincidental, but they’re sparring, and suddenly, Robin just goes, “We make great partners.”

And just like that, Barbara knows that Robin is Dick Grayson. She’s so stunned that he manages to catch her off guard and pin her down to the ground, but she barely notices because it all makes sense. Dick Grayson is Robin. That’s why he looks and sounds so familiar. And if Dick Grayson, Bruce Wayne’s ward, is Robin, then Batman must be…

“I have to go,” she says quickly.

“What?” Robin— _Dick_ asks, frowning. “We were just getting started.”

“I just remembered that I have something to do.”

“At home?”

“I need to go. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says quickly, and before Dick can keep arguing with her, she’s gone. Dick Grayson is Robin. Bruce Wayne is Batman. Barbara ducks out of the secret entrance to the Batcave, and she leans against the wall for a second as she reels from this information.

Dick Grayson is Robin. Bruce Wayne is Batman.

She knows two great secrets that are without a doubt the most important secrets she’s ever kept in her entire life. Little does she know that she’ll spend the next five years protecting those secrets any way she can.

Little does she know that this is only the beginning.


End file.
